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
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/1762
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19381
ER  -