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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.
This article presents a situation description production experiment investigating the interaction between syntax and information structure in Akan, a tone language that belongs to the Kwa branch of the Niger- Congo family spoken in Ghana. Information structure was elicited via context questions that put the object in narrow informational focus or narrow corrective focus while controlling for the tonal structure of the target word. Contrary to the prediction that corrective focus is marked by fronting and morphological marking of the focused constituent the data suggest that the in-situ strategy is the preferred one.
This is the 13th issue of the working paper series Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 632. It is the first part of a series of Linguistic Fieldnote issues which present data collected by members of different projects of the SFB during fieldwork on various languages or dialects spoken worldwide. This part of the Fieldnote Series is dedicated to data from African languages. It contains contributions by Mira Grubic (A5) on Ngizim, and Susanne Genzel & Frank Kügler (D5) on Akan. The papers allow insights into various aspects of the elicitation of formal correlates of focus and related phenomena in different African languages investigated by the SFB in the second funding phase, especially in the period between 2007 and 2010.