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  - Zimmermann, Malte
T1  - Contrastive focus
N2  - The article puts forward a discourse-pragmatic approach to the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. It is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of ‘contrastive focus’, ‘kontrast’ (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or ‘identificational focus’ (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms like introduction of alternatives or exhaustivity. Rather, an adequate analysis must take into account discourse-pragmatic notions like hearer expectation or discourse expectability of the focused content in a given discourse situation. The less expected a given content is judged to be for the hearer, relative to the Common Ground, the more likely a speaker is to mark this content by means of special grammatical devices, giving rise to emphasis.
KW  - contrastive focus
KW  - emphasis
KW  - discourse expectability
Y1  - 2007
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19688
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  - Blaszczak, Joanna
A1  - Dipper, Stefanie
A1  - Fanselow, Gisbert
A1  - Ishihara, Shinishiro
A1  - Petrova, Svetlana
A1  - Skopeteas, Stavros
A1  - Weskott, Thomas
A1  - Zimmermann, Malte
T1  - Syntax
JF  - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS
N2  - The guidelines for syntactic annotation contain the layers that are especially relevant for queries related to the interaction of information structure with syntax. The layers of this level are constituent structure, grammatical functions, and semantic roles.
Y1  - 2007
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-22253
SN  - 1614-4708
SN  - 1866-4725
IS  - 7
SP  - 95
EP  - 133
PB  - Universitätsverlag Potsdam
CY  - Potsdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Blaszczak, Joanna
A1  - Dipper, Stefanie
A1  - Fanselow, Gisbert
A1  - Ishihara, Shinishiro
A1  - Petrova, Svetlana
A1  - Skopeteas, Stavros
A1  - Weskott, Thomas
A1  - Zimmermann, Malte
T1  - Morphology
JF  - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS
N2  - The guidelines for morphological annotation contain the layers that are necessary for understanding the structure of the words in the object language: morphological segmentation, glossing, and annotation of part-of-speech.
Y1  - 2007
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-22247
SN  - 1614-4708
SN  - 1866-4725
IS  - 7
SP  - 55
EP  - 94
PB  - Universitätsverlag Potsdam
CY  - Potsdam
ER  -