Nominal and Verbal Focus in the Chadic Languages (original) (raw)

Types of Focus in English

Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy

Speakers conduct conversations so as to establish a common understanding with their hearers about some aspect of the world. In a discourse model, the speaker keeps track of the development of this common understanding, and labels his linguistic expressions for the way the information they convey relates to the information in the discourse model as developed at that point. In English, pitch accents are used for this purpose. Broadly, their location indicates the size of the 'focus constituent', which contains the constituent(s) whose information status is being signalled, while their distribution within the focus constituent expresses the type (or meaning) of the focus. Different focus meanings are distinguished depending on whether the information represents new information or concerns a correction of existing information, on whether the information reflects a change in the world or a change in the hearer's knowledge about the world, and on whether new knowledge about the world is immediately or only potentially relevant to the hearer. These meanings form a natural class with those proposed earlier for melodic aspects of English intonation.

Focus Structures in Mùwe Ké: Grammatical Category or Much Ado About Nothing?

PhD Thesis/Dissertation, 2020

This thesis investigates the information-structural notion of focus through the morphosyntax of focus structures in Mùwe Ké, a Tibeto-Burman language of Mugu, Nepal with roughly five thousand speakers. The focus structures mainly involve the obligatory focus marking of actors with the otherwise-optional ergative marker -gane and a preferred immediately preverbal focus position for focussed terms, both of which are shown to correlate with the notion of focus. This is a common finding for Tibeto-Burman languages since the expression of information structure in the language family has previously been associated with differential case marking, topic and focus marking, word order and the positioning of salient terms. However, in recent years, the very notion of focus as a stable cross-linguistic category has been debated. The research and analyses presented are based on a corpus of field data collected over three years in Nepal and a grammatical sketch of Mùwe Ké is provided first. Following a discussion on the theoretical approaches and notions that are adopted, a description of focus structures in the language is offered and the manifestations of focus are listed. Subsequently, focus as a category is questioned and an alternative approach is outlined using Cognitive Grammar as the theoretical framework to show the underlying processes that are associated with information update. The reanalysis fails to find evidence for a category of focus in the language due to the lack of any clearly identifiable content or a one-to-one correlation between differential ergative marking, the preverbal position and focus. It does, however, show varying interpretative strategies, or focal effects, that may be associated with information structure and which overlap with the notion of focus.

Aspects of Syntactic Focus Constructions in Igbo

2020

Syntactic focalization in Igbo is a process that requires movement of the focused element to a focus domain (Focus Projection). This paper provides a descriptive analysis of focus constructions in Igbo within the cartographic framework. The data for the analysis were drawn mainly by elicitation from the Ngwa dialect of Igbo which the authors speak with native speakers‟ competence. The findings of this paper reveal that focus strategy in Igbo is in most cases realized by the use of the specific focus marker ka which encodes the focus information. Igbo constructions that contain

Consequences of a syntactic, predicative focus-marking system (2013)

Proceedings of the 2013 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association, 2013

Using original data from Nɬeʔkepmxcín (Thompson River Salish; Thompson 1992, 1996) to illustrate, this paper explores some semantic and syntactic consequences of a purely predicative syntactic focus-marking strategy. If focus is marked on the clausal predicate, and never on argument positions, then there are necessary consequences for other areas of the grammar. I discuss two such consequences in this paper. First, focus sensitive expressions like only must be purely adverbial, and never adnominal. Secondly, since there is one predicate per clause, there can only be one focus per clause. I outline several strategies to deal with discourse contexts which, at least in English, involve multiple foci. Finally, I conclude by suggesting some further potential consequences of a predicative focus-marking system.

Topicality in Sentence Focus Utterances [FORTHCOMING in Studies in Language]

Studies in Language, 2020

Focus and newness are distinct features. The fact that subconstituents of focus can be given or discourse-old has been pointed out in Selkirk (1984) and Lambrecht (1994). Nevertheless, when it comes to Sentence Focus, it is still common to equate Focus with newness, and to treat SF sentences as necessarily all-new. One of the reasons for such bias is that formally or typologically oriented descriptions of SF tend to analyze only intransitive ‘out of the blue’ SF utterances stemming from elicitation. Based on SF utterances in natural speech in Kakabe, a Western Mande language, the present study shows that in natural speech SF utterances are associated with a rich array of discourse strategies. Accordingly, the discourse properties of the referents inside SF are subject to variation and affect the implementation of the focus-marking. The study also shows how the discourse properties of referents define the distribution of the focus marker in Kakabe.

Prosody–Syntax Interaction in the Expression of Focus

Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 2005

Prosodic and syntactic constraints conflict with each other. This is particularly evident in the expression of focus, where the best position for main stress does not necessarily match the best syntactic position for the focused constituent. But focus and stress must match, therefore either stress or the focused constituent must renounce their best position violating either the syntactic or the prosodic constraints responsible for them. This study argues that human language addresses this tension in optimality theoretic terms and that different focus paradigms across different languages reflect different rankings of a shared invariant set of syntactic and prosodic constraints. In particular, only an optimality analysis can account for the focus paradigm of Italian while keeping a prosodic analysis of main stress in accord with the last two decades of phonological research. The analysis extends naturally to focus paradigms in English, French, and Chichewa (including Chichewa's non-culminant sentences, i.e. sentences lacking a single main stress), making no appeal to language specific parametric devices. Overall, the conflicting nature of prosodic and syntactic constraints gives rise to a complex crosslinguistic typology from a single set of universal constraints while keeping interface conditions to an absolute minimum. (3) Italian: Ha riso GIANNI f Context: Who has laughed? Has laughed John

Argument focus in Kar (Senufo) (2006)

Focus theories distinguish different types of focus according to the pragmatic conditions or communicative point on the one side and different scopes of focus on the other side. The assertion in term focus constructions (Dik 1989), called by others argument focus constructions or identificational sentences (Lambrecht 1994), has the purpose of establishing a relation between an argument and an open proposition. Kar, a northeastern Senufo language of Burkina Faso, which has the basic word order S-Aux-O-V-other, has at its disposal different strategies to mark argument focus, among them fronting of the focused item. In many West African languages the displacement of the focused argument involves other devices, such as the use of special verb forms. In Kar fronting of a focused argument requires the use of special pronouns in the out-of-focus part of the sentence, called background subject pronouns. They are used in other backgrounded contexts, too, for example in relative clauses, adverbial clauses and constituent questions. Their inconsistent use is attributed to a particular sociolinguistic situation in which the data has been collected. The use of the same focus strategies for completive and contrastive focus suggests that Kar does not distinguish pragmatic conditions on the level of sentence grammar.