The dislocated relation is used for elements that have been displaced from its regular syntactic position, often to the very front or back of the clause it resides within or of the whole sentence. This applies often to an argument of a clause that has been moved to the periphery for topic, focus, or similar types of effects. However, this relation is also used generally for topic elements that otherwise do not fulfill any core grammatical relation of a sentence, except for temporal nouns (see obl:tmod) or locational nouns (see obl) functioning as adjuncts.
This relation is also used for topicalized and dislocated subjects (followed by a pronoun functioning as the syntactic subject of the sentence and referring back to topicalized subject).
However, this relation does not apply to arguments that appear in non-canonical positions due to valence-changing function words such as 將 zoeng1 or 畀 bei2, which are treated as prepositions instead (see obl:patient).