TY  - CHAP
A1  - Nurse, Derek
T1  - Focus in Bantu: verbal morphology and function
T2  - Papers in Bantu grammar and description / editors: Laura J. Downing, Lutz Marten & Sabine Zerbian, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung, Berlin, 2006, : ZAS papers in linguistics ; Nr. 43
N2  - Although verb forms encoding focus were recorded in various Bantu languages during the twentieth century it was not until the late 1970's that they became the centre of serious attention, starting with the work of Hyman and Watters. In the last decade this attention has grown. While focus can be expressed variously, this paper concentrates largely on its morphological, partly on its tonal expression. On the basis of morphological and tonal behaviour, it identifies four blocks of languages, representing less than a third of all Bantu languages: those with metatony, those with a binary constituent contrast between verb ("disjunctive") and post-verbal ("conjunctive") focus, those with a three-way contrast, and those with verb initial /ni-/. Following Güldemann's lead, it is shown there is a fairly widespread grammaticalisation path whereby focus markers may come to encode progressive aspect, then present tense. Many Bantu languages today have a pre-stem morpheme /a/ 'non-past' and it is hypothesized that many of these /a/, which are otherwise hard to explain historically, may derive from an older focus marker.
KW  - Morphologie
KW  - Thema-Rhema-Gliederung
KW  - Bantusprachen
Y1  - 2006
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/30955
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-309559
UR  - http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/189.html
SN  - 1435-9588
SN  - 0947-7055
VL  - 43
SP  - 189
EP  - 207
PB  - Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung
CY  - Berlin
ER  -