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Information structure
(2007)
In this paper, we describe tools and resources for the study of African languages developed at the Collaborative Research Centre 632 "Information Structure". These include deeply annotated data collections of 25 sub-Saharan languages that are described together with their annotation scheme, as well as the corpus tool ANNIS, which provides unified access to a broad variety of annotations created with a range of different tools. With the application of ANNIS to several African data collections, we illustrate its suitability for the purpose of language documentation, distributed access, and the creation of data archives.
This paper investigates the structural properties of morphosyntactically marked focus constructions, focussing on the often neglected non-focal sentence part in African tone languages. Based on new empirical evidence from five Gur and Kwa languages, we claim that these focus expressions have to be analysed as biclausal constructions even though they do not represent clefts containing restrictive relative clauses. First, we relativize the partly overgeneralized assumptions about structural correspondences between the out-of-focus part and relative clauses, and second, we show that our data do in fact support the hypothesis of a clause coordinating pattern as present in clause sequences in narration. It is argued that we deal with a non-accidental, systematic feature and that grammaticalization may conceal such basic narrative structures.
Contents: 1. Introduction 2. Selection of QUIS Data for Comparative Goals 2.1 Fairy Tale (Topic and Focus in Coherent Discourse) 2.2 Focus Translation Extract 3. On the Presentation and Comparison of the Data 4. Buli 4.1 Tomatoes Fairy Tale in Buli 4.2 Focus Translation Extract in Buli 5. Kɔnni 5.1 Tomatoes Fairy Tale in Kɔnni 5.2 Focus Translation Extract 6. Baatɔnum 6.1 Tomatoes Fairy Tale in Baatɔnum 6.2 Focus Translation Extract in Baatɔnum
The paper investigates focus marking devices in the scarcely documented North-Ghanaian Gur language Konkomba. The two particles lé and lá occur under specific focus conditions and are therefore regarded as focus markers in the sparse literature. Comparing the distribution and obligatoriness of both alleged focus markers however, I show that one of the particles, lé, is better analyzed as a connective particle, i.e. as a syntactic rather than as a genuine pragmatic marker, and that comparable syntactic focus marking strategies for sentence-initial constituents are also known from related languages.