In this dissertation, I examine the marking of focus and givenness in Nte?kepmxcin
(Thompson River Salish). The focus is, roughly, the answer to a wh-question, and is
highlighted by the primary sentential accent in stress languages like English. This has been
formalized as the Stress-Focus Correspondence Principle. Given material is old information,
and is de-accented in languages like English. Nte?kepmxcin is a stress language, but marks
focus structurally. However, I argue that the structure has a prosodie motivation: the clause is
restructured such that the focus is leftmost in the intonational phrase. It follows that Salish
focus structures lack the special semantics that motivates the use of English structural focus
(clefts).
As a theoretical contribution, I show that the Stress-Focus Correspondence Principle
does not account for focus marking in all stress languages, nor does the "distress-given"
generalization account for the marking of given information. This is because focus surfaces
leftmost, while the nuclear stress position is rightmost. Instead of "stress-focus", I propose
that alignment with prosodie phrase edges is the universally common thread in focus
marking. This mechanism enables listeners to rapidly recover the location of the focus, by
identifying coarse-grained phonological categories (p-phrases and i-phrases). In Thompson
River Salish, the focus is associated with the leftmost p-phrase in the matrix intonational
phrase. The analysis unifies the marking of focus across languages by claiming that focus is
always marked prosodically, by alignment to a prosodie category.
The study combines syntactic analysis of focus utterances with their phonetic
realization and semantic characteristics. As such, this dissertation is a story about the
interfaces.
This research is based on a corpus of conversational data as well as single sentence
elicitations, all of which are original data collected during fieldwork. The second contribution
of this dissertation is thus methodological: I have developed various fieldwork techniques for
collecting both spontaneous and scripted conversational discourses. The empirical
contribution that results is a collection of conversational discourses, to add to the single speaker
traditional texts already recorded for Nte?kepmxcin.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/2848 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Koch, Karsten |
| Publisher | University of British Columbia |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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