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Information structure
(2007)
Focus expressions in Foodo
(2007)
This paper aims at presenting different ways of expressing focus in Foodo, a Guang language. We can differentiate between marked and unmarked focus strategies. The marked focus expressions are first syntactically characterized: the focused constituent is in sentence-initial position and is second always marked obligatorily by a focus marker, which is nɩ for non-subjects and N for subjects. Complementary to these structures, Foodo knows an elliptic form consisting of the focused constituent and a predication marker gɛ́. It will be shown that the two focus markers can be analyzed as having developed out of the homophone conjunction nɩ and that the constraints on the use of the focus markers can be best explained by this fact.
Contents: Chapter 1. Introduction 1 Information Structure 2 Grammatical Correlates of Information Structure 3 Structure of the Questionnaire 4 Experimental Tasks 5 Technicalities 6 Archiving 7 Acknowledgments Chapter 2. General Questions 1 General Information 2 Phonology 3 Morphology and Syntax Chapter 3. Experimental tasks 1 Changes (Given/New in Intransitives and Transitives) 2 Giving (Given/New in Ditransitives) 3 Visibility (Given/New, Animacy and Type/Token Reference) 4 Locations (Given/New in Locative Expressions) 5 Sequences (Given/New/Contrast in Transitives) 6 Dynamic Localization (Given/New in Dynamic Loc. Descriptions) 7 Birthday Party (Weight and Discourse Status) 8 Static Localization (Macro-Planning and Given/New in Locatives) 9 Guiding (Presentational Utterances) 10 Event Cards (All New) 11 Anima (Focus types and Animacy) 12 Contrast (Contrast in pairing events) 13 Animal Game (Broad/Narrow Focus in NP) 14 Properties (Focus on Property and Possessor) 15 Eventives (Thetic and Categorical Utterances) 16 Tell a Story (Contrast in Text) 17 Focus Cards (Selective, Restrictive, Additive, Rejective Focus) 18 Who does What (Answers to Multiple Constituent Questions) 19 Fairy Tale (Topic and Focus in Coherent Discourse) 20 Map Task (Contrastive and Selective Focus in Spontaneous Dialogue) 21 Drama (Contrastive Focus in Argumentation) 22 Events in Places (Spatial, Temporal and Complex Topics) 23 Path Descriptions (Topic Change in Narrative) 24 Groups (Partial Topic) 25 Connections (Bridging Topic) 26 Indirect (Implicational Topic) 27 Surprises (Subject-Topic Interrelation) 28 Doing (Action Given, Action Topic) 29 Influences (Question Priming) Chapter 4. Translation tasks 1 Basic Intonational Properties 2 Focus Translation 3 Topic Translation 4 Quantifiers Chapter 5. Information structure summary survey 1 Preliminaries 2 Syntax 3 Morphology 4 Prosody 5 Summary: Information structure Chapter 6. Performance of Experimental Tasks in the Field 1 Field sessions 2 Field Session Metadata 3 Informants’ Agreement
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.
