@article{ZimmermannOnea2011,
  author    = {Zimmermann, Malte and Onea, Edgar},
  title     = {Focus marking and focus interpretation},
  series = {LINGUA},
  volume    = {121},
  journal   = {LINGUA},
  number    = {11},
  publisher = {ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV},
  address   = {AMSTERDAM},
  issn      = {0024-3841},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.lingua.2011.06.002},
  pages     = {1651 -- 1670},
  year      = {2011},
  abstract  = {The languages of the world exhibit a range of formal phenomena (e.g. accenting, syntactic reordering and morphological marking) that are commonly linked to the information-structural notion of focus. Crucially, there does not seem to be a one-to-one mapping between particular formal features (focus marking devices) and focus, neither from a cross-linguistic perspective, nor within individual languages. This raises the question of what is actually being expressed if we say that a constituent is focused in a particular language, and whether, or to what extent, the same semantic or pragmatic content is formally expressed by focus-marking across languages. This special issue addresses the question of focus and its grammatical realization from a number of theoretical and empirical perspectives. In this introductory article we elaborate on this question by making an explicit proposal about what we take to be the correct way of thinking about the information-structural category of focus and its formal realization. In the first part, we introduce a unified semantico-pragmatic perspective on focus in terms of alternatives and possible worlds. In the second part, we present a cursory cross-linguistic overview of focus marking strategies as found in the languages of the world. Finally, in the third part, we discuss the connection between the notion of focus, different pragmatic uses of focus and different focus marking strategies employed in the grammars of natural languages. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{HartmannZimmermann2012,
  author    = {Hartmann, Katharina and Zimmermann, Malte},
  title     = {Focus marking in Bura - semantic uniformity matches syntactic heterogeneity},
  series = {Natural language \& linguistic theory},
  volume    = {30},
  journal   = {Natural language \& linguistic theory},
  number    = {4},
  publisher = {Springer},
  address   = {Dordrecht},
  issn      = {0167-806X},
  doi       = {10.1007/s11049-012-9174-4},
  pages     = {1061 -- 1108},
  year      = {2012},
  abstract  = {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.},
  language  = {en}
}