Morphological focus marking in Gùrùntùm (West Chadic)
- 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.
Author details: | Katharina Hartmann, Malte ZimmermannORCiDGND |
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URL: | http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00243841 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2009.02.002 |
ISSN: | 0024-3841 |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Year of first publication: | 2009 |
Publication year: | 2009 |
Release date: | 2017/03/25 |
Source: | Lingua. - ISSN 0024-3841. - 119 (2009), 9, S. 1340 - 1365 |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
Peer review: | Referiert |