TY - JOUR A1 - Féry, Caroline A1 - Hartmann, Katharina T1 - The Focus and prosodic structure of German Gapping and right Node Raising Y1 - 2005 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Hartmann, Katharina A1 - Zimmermann, Malte T1 - Morphological focus marking in Gùrùntùm (West Chadic) N2 - 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. KW - morphological focus marking KW - focus ambiguity KW - focus types KW - foregrounding Y1 - 2006 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19525 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hartmann, Katharina A1 - Zimmermann, Malte T1 - Morphological focus marking in Gùrùntùm (West Chadic) N2 - The paper presents an in-depth study of focus marking in Guruntum, a West Chadic language spoken in Bauchi State in Nigeria. Focus in Guruntum is marked morphologically by means of a focus marker a, which typically precedes the focused constituent. Even though the morphological focus-marking system of Guruntum allows for a lot of fine-grained distinctions in information structure (IS), the language is not entirely free of focus ambiguities that are the result of conflicting IS- and syntactic requirements governing the placement of focus markers. We show that morphological focus marking with a applies across different types of focus, such as new-information, contrastive, selective and corrective focus, and that a does not have a second function as a perfective marker, as is assumed in the literature. In contrast, we argue that sentence-final occurrences of a in perfective sentences are markers of sentential focus and have additional functions at the level of discourse structure. Y1 - 2009 UR - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00243841 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2009.02.002 SN - 0024-3841 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Fiedler, Ines A1 - Hartmann, Katharina A1 - Reineke, Brigitte A1 - Schwarz, Anne A1 - Zimmermann, Malte T1 - Subject focus in West African languages Y1 - 2010 SN - 978-0-19-957095-9 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hartmann, Katharina A1 - Zimmermann, Malte T1 - Focus marking in Bura - semantic uniformity matches syntactic heterogeneity JF - Natural language & linguistic theory N2 - The present article introduces a theory of (morpho-)syntactic focus marking on nominal categories in Bura, a Central Chadic SVO language spoken in the northeast of Nigeria. Our central claim is that the particle an plays a crucial role in the marking of subject and non-subject focus. We put forward a uniform analysis of an as a focus copula that selects for syntactic predicates of type < e,t > and a focused constituent of type < e >. This uniform semantic representation is transparently mapped onto different syntactic structures: In a clause with a focused subject, the focus copula appears between the subject in SpecTP and the predicative VP. On the other hand, syntactically focused non-subjects are fronted and appear in a bi-clausal cleft structure that contains the focus copula and a relative cleft-remnant. The non-uniform analysis of focus marking is further supported by the structure of predicative constructions, in which the focus copula separates the focused subject and the adjectival or nominal predicate. It is also shown that alternative unified analyses fail to account for the full range of Bura data. The latter part of the article provides an analysis of the Bura cleft construction. Based on syntactic and semantic evidence, we come to the conclusion that the clefted constituent is base-generated in its initial surface position, and that an empty operator moves within the relative clause. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the potential conceptual reasons behind the observed subject/non-subject asymmetry in Bura. KW - Focus KW - Focus marking KW - Cleft structure KW - Focus copula KW - Focus asymmetries KW - Chadic languages Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-012-9174-4 SN - 0167-806X VL - 30 IS - 4 SP - 1061 EP - 1108 PB - Springer CY - Dordrecht ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Chiarcos, Christian A1 - Fiedler, Ines A1 - Grubic, Mira A1 - Hartmann, Katharina A1 - Ritz, Julia A1 - Schwarz, Anne A1 - Zeldes, Amir A1 - Zimmermann, Malte T1 - Information structure in African languages corpora and tools JF - Language resources and evaluation N2 - In this paper, we describe tools and resources for the study of African languages developed at the Collaborative Research Centre 632 "Information Structure". These include deeply annotated data collections of 25 sub-Saharan languages that are described together with their annotation scheme, as well as the corpus tool ANNIS, which provides unified access to a broad variety of annotations created with a range of different tools. With the application of ANNIS to several African data collections, we illustrate its suitability for the purpose of language documentation, distributed access, and the creation of data archives. KW - African language resources KW - Pragmatics KW - Corpus search infrastructure Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-011-9153-0 SN - 1574-020X VL - 45 IS - 3 SP - 361 EP - 374 PB - Springer CY - Dordrecht ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hartmann, Katharina A1 - Zimmermann, Malte T1 - Focus strategies in chadic BT - the case of tangale revisited JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - We argue that the standard focus theories reach their limits when confronted with the focus systems of the Chadic languages. The backbone of the standard focus theories consists of two assumptions, both called into question by the languages under consideration. Firstly, it is standardly assumed that focus is generally marked by stress. The Chadic languages, however, exhibit a variety of different devices for focus marking. Secondly, it is assumed that focus is always marked. In Tangale, at least, focus is not marked consistently on all types of constituents. The paper offers two possible solutions to this dilemma. KW - tone languages KW - focus marking KW - focus movement Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-8423 SN - 1866-4725 SN - 1614-4708 IS - 1 SP - 207 EP - 243 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hartmann, Katharina T1 - Focus and Tone N2 - Tone is a distinctive feature of the lexemes in tone languages. The information-structural category focus is usually marked by syntactic and morphological means in these languages, but sometimes also by intonation strategies. In intonation languages, focus is marked by pitch movements, which are also perceived as tone. The present article discusses prosodic focus marking in these two language types. KW - Tone (language) KW - intonation (language) KW - focus KW - pitch accent KW - prosodic phrasing Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19729 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hartmann, Katharina A1 - Jacob, Peggy A1 - Zimmermann, Malte T1 - Focus asymmetries in Bura N2 - (Chadic), which exhibits a number of asymmetries: Grammatical focus marking is obligatory only with focused subjects, where focus is marked by the particle án following the subject. Focused subjects remain in situ and the complement of án is a regular VP. With nonsubject foci, án appears in a cleft-structure between the fronted focus constituent and a relative clause. We present a semantically unified analysis of focus marking in Bura that treats the particle as a focusmarking copula in T that takes a property-denoting expression (the background) and an individual-denoting expression (the focus) as arguments. The article also investigates the realization of predicate and polarity focus, which are almost never marked. The upshot of the discussion is that Bura shares many characteristic traits of focus marking with other Chadic languages, but it crucially differs in exhibiting a structural difference in the marking of focus on subjects and non-subject constituents. KW - Afro-Asiatic KW - focus asymmetries KW - argument/adjunct focus KW - predicate focus KW - polarity focus KW - cleft KW - focus copula Y1 - 2008 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19381 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Robin, Koger A1 - Katharina, Syböck A1 - Emily, Weinelt A1 - Beda, Hartmann A1 - Kirchengast, Sylvia ED - Scheffler, Christiane ED - Koziel, Slawomir ED - Hermanussen, Michael ED - Bogin, Barry T1 - Advanced maternal age and nicotine consumption during pregnancy BT - Additive effects on new-born parameters T2 - Human Biology and Public Health N2 - Background Nicotine consumption during pregnancy and advanced maternal age are well known independent risk factors for poor pregnancy outcome and therefore serious public health problems. Objectives Considering the ongoing trend of delaying childbirth in our society, this study investigates potential additive effects of nicotine consumption during pregnancy and advanced maternal age on foetal growth. Sample and Methods In a medical record-based study, we analysed the impact of maternal age and smoking behaviour before and during pregnancy on newborn size among 4142 singleton births that took place in Vienna, Austria between 1990 and 1995. Results Birth weight (H=82.176, p<0.001), birth length (H=91.525, p<0.001) and head circumference (H=42.097, p<0.001) differed significantly according to maternal smoking behaviour. For birth weight, the adjusted mean differences between smokers and non-smokers increased from 101.8g for the < 18-year-old mothers to 254.8g for >35 year olds, with the respective values for birth length being 0.6 cm to 0.7cm, for head circumference from 0.3 cm to 0.6 cm. Conclusion Increasing maternal age amplified the negative effects of smoking during pregnancy on newborn parameters. Our findings identify older smoking mothers as a high-risk group which should be of special interest for public health systems. KW - advanced maternal age at first birth KW - maternal nicotine consumption KW - foetal growth KW - newborn size KW - birthweight KW - smoking Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.52905/hbph.v1.6 SN - 2748-9957 VL - 2021 IS - 1 SP - 1 EP - 19 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER -