Filtern
Dokumenttyp
- Wissenschaftlicher Artikel (15) (entfernen)
Sprache
- Englisch (15)
Gehört zur Bibliographie
- ja (15) (entfernen)
Schlagworte
- Akan (2)
- Acquisition (1)
- Artificial language paradigm (1)
- Exceptional alternation (1)
- German intonation (1)
- Information structure (1)
- Nuclear accent (1)
- Phonology (1)
- Phonotactics (1)
- Predictability (1)
Phonology and intonation
(2007)
It has been observed for many African languages that focussed subjects
have to appear outside of their syntactic base position, as opposed to
focussed objects, which can remain in-situ. This is known as subjectobject
asymmetry of focus marking, which Fiedler et al. (2010) claim
to hold also for Akan. Genzel (2013), on the other hand, argues that
Akan does not exhibit a subject-object focus asymmetry. A questionnaire
study and a production experiment were carried out to investigate
whether focussed subjects may indeed be realized in-situ in Akan. The
results suggest that (i) focussed subjects do not have to be obligatorily
realized ex-situ, and that (ii) the syntactic preference for the realization
of a focussed subject highly depends on exhaustivity.
The aim of this paper is to outline the means for encoding information structure in Yucatec Maya. Yucatec Maya is a tone language, displaying a three-fold opposition in the tonal realization of syllables. From the morpho-syntactic point of view, the grammar of Yucatec Maya contains morphological (topic affixes, morphological marking of out-of-focus predicates) and syntactic (designated positions) means to uniquely specify syntactic constructions for their information structure. After a descriptive overview of these phenomena, we present experimental evidence which reveals the impact of the nonavailability of prosodic alternatives on the choice of syntactic constructions in language production.