TY  - JOUR
A1  - Akuoko Duah, Reginald
T1  - Exhaustive Focus Marking in Akan
JF  - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632
N2  - This paper reopens the discussion on focus marking in Akan (Kwa,
Niger-Congo) by examining the semantics of the so-called focus marker
in the language. It is shown that the so-called focus marker expresses
exhaustivity when it occurs in a sentence with narrow focus. The study
employs four standard tests for exhaustivity proposed in the literature
to examine the semantics of Akan focus constructions (Szabolsci 1981,
1994; É. Kiss 1998; Hartmann and Zimmermann 2007). It is shown that
although a focused entity with the so-called focus marker nà is
interpreted to mean ‘only X and nothing/nobody else,’ this meaning
appears to be pragmatic.
KW  - Akan
KW  - focus marker
KW  - cleft
KW  - exhaustivity
KW  - ex situ
KW  - in situ
KW  - subject/non-subject asymmetry
Y1  - 2015
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-83748
SN  - 1614-4708
SN  - 1866-4725
IS  - 19
SP  - 1
EP  - 28
PB  - Universitätsverlag Potsdam
CY  - Potsdam
ER  - 
TY  - GEN
A1  - Cheng, Lisa Lai-Shen
A1  - Vicente, Luis
T1  - Verb doubling in Mandarin Chinese
T2  - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2  - This article examines two so-far-understudied verb doubling constructions in Mandarin Chinese, viz., verb doubling clefts and verb doubling lian…dou. We show that these constructions have the same internal syntax as regular clefts and lian…dou sentences, the doubling effect being epiphenomenal; therefore, we classify them as subtypes of the general cleft and lian…dou constructions, respectively, rather than as independent constructions. Additionally, we also show that, as in many other languages with comparable constructions, the two instances of the verb are part of a single movement chain, which has the peculiarity of allowing Spell-Out of more than one link.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 629 
KW  - Mandarin Chinese
KW  - verb doubling
KW  - verb movement
KW  - cleft
KW  - lian…dou
Y1  - 2020
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-436880
SN  - 1866-8364
IS  - 629
SP  - 1
EP  - 37
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  -