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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:Potsdam/oai:kobv.de-opus-ubp:1952 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Hartmann, Katharina, Zimmermann, Malte |
| Publisher | Universität Potsdam, Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät. Institut für Linguistik / Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft |
| Source Sets | Potsdam University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | InBook |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/doku/urheberrecht.php |
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