TY - BOOK A1 - Renans, Agata A1 - Zimmermann, Malte A1 - Greif, Markus T1 - Questionnaire on focus semantics. - 2nd edition N2 - This is the 15th issue of the working paper series Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 632. This online version contains the Questionnaire on Focus Semantics contributed by Agata Renans, Malte Zimmermann and Markus Greif, members of Project D2 investigating information structural phenomena from a typological perspective. The present issue provides a tool for collecting and analyzing natural data with respect to relevant linguistic questions concerning focus types, focus sensitive particles, and the effects of quantificational adverbs and presupposition on focus semantics. This volume is a supplementation to the Reference manual of the Questionnaire on Information Structure, issued by Project D2 in ISIS 4 (2006). T3 - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 - 15, 2nd E. KW - focus sensitive expressions KW - semantic fieldwork KW - methodology Y1 - 2011 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-50359 ER - TY - BOOK A1 - Renans, Agata A1 - Zimmermann, Malte A1 - Greif, Markus T1 - Questionnaire on focus semantics N2 - This is the 15th issue of the working paper series Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 632. This online version contains the Questionnaire on Focus Semantics contributed by Agata Renans, Malte Zimmermann and Markus Greif, members of Project D2 investigating information structural phenomena from a typological perspective. The present issue provides a tool for collecting and analyzing natural data with respect to relevant linguistic questions concerning focus types, focus sensitive particles, and the effects of quantificational adverbs and presupposition on focus semantics. This volume is a supplementation to the Reference manual of the Questionnaire on Information Structure, issued by Project D2 in ISIS 4 (2006). T3 - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 - 15 KW - focus sensitive expressions KW - semantic fieldwork KW - methodology Y1 - 2010 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-36826 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Mucha, Anne A1 - Engels, James J. A1 - Whibley, Fred A1 - Uegaki, Wataru A1 - Wamsley, James C. A1 - Dawson, Virginia A1 - Gruzdeva, Anastasija A1 - Alhazova, Anna A1 - Golovnina, Anna A1 - Nasyrova, Regina A1 - Sadkovsky, Feudor A1 - Weingartz, Siena A1 - Hohaus, Vera A1 - Cisse, Ousmane A1 - Coppock, Elizabeth A1 - Agodio, Badiba Olivier A1 - Jenks, Peter A1 - Sande, Hannah A1 - Zimmermann, Malte A1 - Berezovskaya, Polina A1 - Chen, Sihwei A1 - Renans, Agata ED - Lecavelier des Etangs-Levallois, Jeanne ED - Geick, Niklas ED - Grubic, Mira ED - Bharadwaj, Prarthanaa ED - Zimmermann, Malte T1 - Proceedings of TripleA 10 BT - fieldwork perspectives on the semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian languages T2 - Proceedings of TripleA N2 - The TripleA workshop series was founded in 2014 by linguists from Potsdam and Tübingen with the aim of providing a platform for researchers that conduct theoretically-informed linguistic fieldwork on meaning. Its focus is particularly on languages that are under-represented in the current research landscape, including but not limited to languages of Africa, Asia, and Australia, hence TripleA. For its 10th anniversary, TripleA returned to the University of Potsdam on the 7-9th of June 2023. The programme included 21 talks dealing with no less than 22 different languages, including three invited talks given by Sihwei Chen (Academia Sinica), Jérémy Pasquereau (Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes, CNRS) and Agata Renans (Ruhr-Universität Bochum). Nine of these (invited or peer-reviewed) talks are featured in this volume. N2 - Die TripleA-Workshop-Reihe wurde 2014 von Linguisten aus Potsdam und Tübingen mit dem Ziel gegründet, eine Plattform für Forscherinnen und Forscher zu bieten, die theoretisch informierte Feldforschung zu sprachlicher Bedeutung betreiben. Der Fokus liegt insbesondere auf Sprachen, die in der aktuellen Forschungslandschaft unterrepräsentiert sind, einschließlich (aber nicht ausschließlich) auf Sprachen aus Afrika, Asien und Australien: daher der Name TripleA. Zu seinem 10-jährigen Bestehen kehrte TripleA vom 7. Bis 9. Juni 2023 an die Universität Potsdam zurück. Das Programm umfasste 21 Vorträge zu nicht weniger als 22 verschiedenen Sprachen, darunter drei eingeladene Vorträge von Sihwei Chen (Academia Sinica), Jérémy Pasquereau (Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes, CNRS) und Agata Renans (Ruhr-Universität Bochum). Neun dieser (eingeladenen oder begutachteten) Vorträge sind in diesem Band abgedruckt. KW - African languages KW - Asian languages KW - Austronesian languages KW - fieldwork KW - semantics KW - afrikanische Sprachen KW - asiatische Sprachen KW - austronesische Sprachen KW - Feldforschung KW - Semantik Y1 - 2024 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-647980 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Grubic, Mira A1 - Renans, Agata A1 - Duah, Reginald Akuoko T1 - Focus, exhaustivity and existence in Akan, Ga and Ngamo JF - Linguistics : an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences N2 - This paper discusses the relation between focus marking and focus interpretation in Akan (Kwa), Ga (Kwa), and Ngamo (West Chadic). In all three languages, there is a special morphosyntactically marked focus/background construction, as well as morphosyntactically unmarked focus. We present data stemming from original fieldwork investigatingwhether marked focus/background constructions in these three languages also have additional interpretative effects apart from standard focus interpretation. Crosslinguistically, different additional inferences have been found for marked focus constructions, e.g. contrast (e.g. Vallduvi, Enric & Maria Vilkuna. 1997. On rheme and kontrast. In Peter Culicover & Louise McNally (eds.), The limits of syntax (Syntax and semantics 29), 79-108. New York: Academic Press; Hartmann, Katharina & Malte Zimmermann. 2007b. In place -Out of place: Focus in Hausa. In Kerstin Schwabe & Susanne Winkler (eds.), On information structure, meaning and form, 365-403. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.; Destruel, Emilie & Leah Velleman. 2014. Refining contrast: Empirical evidence from the English it-cleft. In Christopher Pinon (ed.), Empirical issues in syntax and semantics 10, 197-214. Paris: Colloque de syntaxe et semantique a Paris (CSSP). http://www.cssp.cnrs.fr/eiss10/), exhaustivity (e.g. E. Kiss, Katalin. 1998. Identificational focus versus information focus. Language 74(2). 245-273.; Hartmann, Katharina & Malte Zimmermann. 2007a. Exhaustivity marking in Hausa: A re-evaluation of the particle nee/cee. In Enoch O. Aboh, Katharina Hartmann & Malte Zimmermann (eds.), Focus strategies in African languages: The interaction of focus and grammar in Niger-Congo and AfroAsiatic (Trends in Linguistics 191), 241-263. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.), and existence (e.g. Rooth, Mats. 1999. Association with focus or association with presupposition? In Peter Bosch & Rob van der Sandt (eds.), Focus: Linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives, 232-244. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.; von Fintel, Kai & Lisa Matthewson. 2008. Universals in semantics. The Linguistic Review 25(1-2). 139-201). This paper investigates these three inferences. In Akan and Ga, the marked focus constructions are found to be contrastive, while in Ngamo, no effect of contrast was found. We also show that marked focus constructions in Ga and Akan trigger exhaustivity and existence presuppositions, while the marked construction in Ngamo merely gives rise to an exhaustive conversational implicature and does not trigger an existence presupposition. Instead, the marked construction in Ngamo merely indicates salience of the backgrounded part via a morphological background marker related to the definite determiner (Schuh, Russell G. 2005. Yobe state, Nigeria as a linguistic area. Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 31(2). 77-94; Guldemann, Tom. 2016. Maximal backgrounding = focus without (necessary) focus encoding. Studies in Language 40(3). 551590). The paper thus contributes to the understanding of the semantics of marked focus constructions across languages and points to the crosslinguistic variation in expressing and interpreting marked focus/background constructions. KW - focus KW - cleft KW - contrast KW - exhaustivity KW - existence presupposition KW - salience Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2018-0035 SN - 0024-3949 SN - 1613-396X VL - 57 IS - 1 SP - 221 EP - 268 PB - De Gruyter Mouton CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Renans, Agata A1 - De Veaugh-Geiss, Joseph P. T1 - Experimental Studies on it-Clefts and Predicate Interpretation JF - Semantics and pragmatics N2 - There is an ongoing discussion in the literature whether the series of sentences ‘It’s not α that did P. α and β did P.’ is acceptable or not. Whereas the homogeneity approach in Büring & Križ 2013, Križ 2016, and Križ 2017 predicts these sentences to be unacceptable, the alternative-based approach predicts acceptability depending on the predicate being interpreted distributively or non- distributively (among others, Horn 1981, Velleman et al. 2012, Renans 2016a,b). We report on three experiments testing the predictions of both types of approaches. These studies provide empirical data that not only bears on these approaches, but also allows us to distinguish between different accounts of cleft exhaustivity that might otherwise make the same predictions. The results of the three studies reported here suggest that the acceptability of clefts depends on the interpretation of the predicate, thereby posing a serious challenge to the homogeneity approach, and contributing to the ongoing discussion on the semantics of it-clefts. KW - it-clefts KW - exhaustivity KW - homogeneity KW - distributive,collective, and mixed predicates KW - distributive vs. non-distributive interpretation KW - experimental study Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.11 SN - 1937-8912 VL - 12 PB - Linguistic Society of America CY - Washington ER -