Morphological focus marking in Gùrùntùm (West Chadic)

  • The paper presents an in-depth study of focus marking in Gùrùntùm, a West Chadic language spoken in Bauchi Province of Northern Nigeria. Focus in Gùrùntùm is marked morphologically by means of a focus marker a, which typically precedes the focus constituent. Even though the morphological focus-marking system of Gùrùntùm allows for a lot of fine-grained distinctions in information structure (IS) in principle, the language is not entirely free of focus ambiguities that arise as the result of conflicting IS- and syntactic requirements that govern the placement of focus markers. We show that morphological focus marking with a applies across different types of focus, such as newinformation, contrastive, selective and corrective focus, and that a does not have a second function as a perfectivity marker, as is assumed in the literature. In contrast, we show at the end of the paper that a can also function as a foregrounding device at the level of discourse structure.

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Metadaten
Author details:Katharina Hartmann, Malte ZimmermannORCiDGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19525
Publication type:Part of a Book
Language:English
Publication year:2006
Publishing institution:Universität Potsdam
Release date:2008/07/21
Tag:focus ambiguity; focus types; foregrounding; morphological focus marking
RVK - Regensburg classification:-
Organizational units:Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik
DDC classification:4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache
Collection(s):Universität Potsdam / Schriftenreihen / Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632, ISSN 1866-4725 / ISIS (2006) 05
Institution name at the time of the publication:Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Linguistik / Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
License (German):License LogoKeine öffentliche Lizenz: Unter Urheberrechtsschutz
External remark:erschienen in:
Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; Working papers of the SFB 632. - Potsdam : Univ.-Verl. Vol. 5. - 2006. - 221 S. : graph. Darst. ISSN 1614-4708 ISBN 978-3-939469-41-4
URN: urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-13047
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