TY  - CHAP
A1  - Hartmann, Katharina
A1  - Zimmermann, Malte
T1  - Morphological focus marking in Gùrùntùm (West Chadic)
T2  - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure / Ishihara, S., M. Schmitz, and A. Schwarz (eds.) ; Working Papers of the SFB 632, Interdisciplinary studies on information structure (ISIS) ; Vol. 5
N2  - The paper presents an in-depth study of focus marking in Gùrùntùm, a West Ch adic 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.
KW  - morphological focus marking
KW  - focus ambiguity
KW  - focus types
KW  - foregrounding
Y1  - 2006
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/10052
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30-1112411
UR  - http://www.sfb632.uni-potsdam.de/publications/isis05_2hartmann.pdf
SN  - 978-3-939469-41-4
SP  - 61
EP  - 105
PB  - Univ.-Verl.
CY  - Potsdam
ER  -