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Title
Morphological focus marking in Gùrùntùm (West Chadic) |
Full text
http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2008/1952/ |
Date
2006 |
Author(s)
Hartmann, Katharina; Zimmermann, Malte |
Abstract
The paper presents an in-depth study of focus marking in Gùrùntùm, a West Chadic language spoken in Bauchi Province of Northern Nigeria. Focus in Gùrùntùm is marked morphologically by means of a focus marker a, which typically precedes the focus constituent. Even though the morphological focus-marking system of Gùrùntùm allows for a lot of fine-grained distinctions in information structure (IS) in principle, the language is not entirely free of focus ambiguities that arise as the result of conflicting IS- and syntactic requirements that govern the placement of focus markers. We show that morphological focus marking with a applies across different types of focus, such as newinformation, contrastive, selective and corrective focus, and that a does not have a second function as a perfectivity marker, as is assumed in the literature. In contrast, we show at the end of the paper that a can also function as a foregrounding device at the level of discourse structure. |
Subject(s)
morphological focus marking; focus ambiguity; focus types; foregrounding; Language, Linguistics |
Language
eng |
Publisher
Universität Potsdam; Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät. Institut für Linguistik / Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft |
Type of publication
InBook |
Format
application/pdf |
Rights
http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/doku/urheberrecht.php |
Identifier
urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19525 |
Repository
Potsdam - University of Potsdam
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Added to C-A: 2008-12-22;03:57:58 |
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