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Subject and non-subject ex-situ focus in Dagbani
- This paper offers a description and account of the patterns of 'ex-situ' focus in Dagbani. We show that there are two syntactic strategies for creating 'ex-situ' focus in the language, one involving A’-movement to the left periphery, and the second involving base generation in the left periphery combined with coreference to a resumptive pronoun. Furthermore, we argue that subjects are difficult to move from Spec,TP to Spec,CP in the left-periphery because of 'anti-locality', which creates a tension when trying to focus subjects, which are required to derivationally fill the specifier of both positions. We further show that what looks to be a two-way distinction between the behaviour of subjects and non-subjects in the language is in fact a three-way distinction between subjects that are focussed to a local left-periphery, subjects that are focussed to a non-local left-periphery, and non-subjects. These distinctions arise due to there being two methods for Dagbani to resolve the antilocality problem of subject movement, and so local subjects solve the problem differently to non-local subjects.
Author: | Samuel Alhassan Issah, Peter William Smith |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-531592 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.664 |
ISSN: | 2397-1835 |
Parent Title (German): | Glossa: a journal of general linguistics |
Publisher: | Ubiquity Press |
Place of publication: | London |
Document Type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of Publication (online): | 2020/01/08 |
Date of first Publication: | 2020/01/08 |
Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
Release Date: | 2020/04/10 |
Tag: | antilocality; focus movement; resumptive pronouns; subject-only resumption |
Volume: | 5 |
Issue: | Art. 4 |
Page Number: | 36 |
First Page: | 1 |
Last Page: | 36 |
HeBIS-PPN: | 463903625 |
Institutes: | Neuere Philologien / Neuere Philologien |
Dewey Decimal Classification: | 4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache |
4 Sprache / 49 Andere Sprachen / 490 Andere Sprachen | |
Sammlungen: | Universitätspublikationen |
Licence (German): | Creative Commons - Namensnennung 4.0 |