@article{ChenHoehle2018,
  author    = {Chen, Aoju and H{\"o}hle, Barbara},
  title     = {Four- to five-year-old' use of word order and prosody in focus marking in Dutch},
  series = {Linguistics Vanguard},
  volume    = {4},
  journal   = {Linguistics Vanguard},
  publisher = {De Gruyter},
  address   = {Berlin},
  issn      = {2199-174X},
  doi       = {10.1515/lingvan-2016-0101},
  pages     = {9},
  year      = {2018},
  abstract  = {This study investigated Dutch-speaking four- to five-year-olds' use of word order and prosody in distinguishing focus types (broad focus, narrow focus, and contrastive narrow focus) via an interactive answer-reconstruction game. We have found an overall preference for the unmarked word order SVO and no evidence for the use of OVS to distinguish focus types. But the children used pitch and duration in the subject-nouns to distinguish focus types in SVO sentences. These findings show that Dutch-speaking four- to five-year-olds differ from their German- and Finnish-speaking peers, who show evidence of varying choice of word order to mark specific focus types, and use prosody to distinguish focus types in subject and object nouns in both SVO and OVS sentences. These comparisons suggest that typological differences in the relative importance between word order and prosody can lead to differences in children's use of word order and prosody in unmarked and marked word orders. A more equal role of word order and prosody in the ambient language can stimulate more extensive use of prosody in the marked word order, whereas a more limited role of word order can restrict the use of prosody in the unmarked word order.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{GrubicRenansDuah2018,
  author    = {Grubic, Mira and Renans, Agata and Duah, Reginald Akuoko},
  title     = {Focus, exhaustivity and existence in Akan, Ga and Ngamo},
  series = {Linguistics : an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences},
  volume    = {57},
  journal   = {Linguistics : an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences},
  number    = {1},
  publisher = {De Gruyter Mouton},
  address   = {Berlin},
  issn      = {0024-3949},
  doi       = {10.1515/ling-2018-0035},
  pages     = {221 -- 268},
  year      = {2018},
  abstract  = {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.},
  language  = {en}
}