Cambridge Grammar of English Hardback with cd-rom a comprehensive Guide

TAILS

97

Tails and clause structure   

97a

Tails are similar to headers in that items are placed outside the 

S

-

V

-

X

clause structure

(

Û

above, 96

), but they occur after the clause. Tails are typically noun phrases. They

clarify or make explicit something in the main clause. Most commonly, a tail consists

of a full noun phrase which clarifies or repeats the referent of a pronoun in the

clause that comes before it. Like headers, tails feature only very rarely in written

English but are a standard feature of informal spoken grammar:

clause

tail

He’s amazingly clever, that dog of theirs.

194 | From utterance to discourse

Cambridge Grammar of English

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Tails are sometimes referred to as ‘right-dislocated’ structures, but in this book 

we do not use that term for the same reason that we do not use the term ‘left

dislocated’.