Return to search

Morphological focus marking in Gùrùntùm (West Chadic)

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.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:Potsdam/oai:kobv.de-opus-ubp:1952
Date January 2006
CreatorsHartmann, Katharina, Zimmermann, Malte
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

Page generated in 0.0022 seconds