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Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; Working papers of the SFB 632. - Vol. 10January 2008 (has links)
The 10th volume of the working paper series contains two papers contributed by
SFB-members.
The first paper “Single prosodic phrase sentences” by Caroline Féry (A1) and
Heiner Drenhaus (C6, University of Potsdam) investigates the prosody of
Wide Focus Partial Fronting in a series of production and perception
experiments.
The second paper “Focus Asymmetries in Bura” by Katharina Hartmann,
Peggy Jacob (B2, Humboldt University Berlin) and Malte Zimmermann (A5,
University of Potsdam) explores the strategies of marking focus in Bura
(Chadic).
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Focus asymmetries in BuraHartmann, Katharina, Jacob, Peggy, Zimmermann, Malte January 2008 (has links)
(Chadic), which exhibits a number of asymmetries: Grammatical focus marking is obligatory only with focused subjects, where focus is marked by the particle án following the subject. Focused subjects remain in situ and the complement of án is a regular VP. With nonsubject foci, án appears in a cleft-structure between the fronted focus constituent and a relative clause. We present a semantically unified analysis of focus marking in Bura that treats the particle as a focusmarking copula in T that takes a property-denoting expression (the
background) and an individual-denoting expression (the focus) as arguments. The article also investigates the realization of predicate and polarity focus, which are almost never marked. The upshot of the discussion is that Bura shares many characteristic traits of focus marking with other Chadic languages, but it crucially differs in exhibiting a structural difference in the marking of focus on subjects and non-subject constituents.
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