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Focus expressions in Foodo

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.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:Potsdam/oai:kobv.de-opus-ubp:1942
Date January 2007
CreatorsFiedler, Ines
PublisherUniversität Potsdam, Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät. Institut für Linguistik / Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
Source SetsPotsdam University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeInBook
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightshttp://opus.kobv.de/ubp/doku/urheberrecht.php

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