Focus feature percolation: Evidence from Tundra Nenets and Tundra Yukaghir

  • Two Siberian languages, Tundra Nenets and Tundra Yukaghir, do not obey strong island constraints in questioning: any sub-constituent of a relative or adverbial clause can be questioned. We argue that this has to do with how focusing works in these languages. The focused sub-constituent remains in situ, but there is abundant morphosyntactic evidence that the focus feature is passed up to the head of the clause. The result is the formation of a complex focus structure in which both the head and non head daughter are overtly marked as focus, and they are interpreted as a pairwise list such that the focus background is applicable to this list, but not to other alternative lists.

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Metadaten
Author:Dejan Matić, Irina NikolaevaGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-723552
DOI:https://doi.org/10.21248/hpsg.2014.16
ISSN:1535-1793
Parent Title (English):Proceedings of the ... International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG)
Publisher:CSLI Publications
Place of publication:Stanford, CA
Document Type:Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2014/10/10
Year of first Publication:2014
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Contributing Corporation:International Conference on Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (21 : 2014 : Buffalo, NY)
Release Date:2024/09/11
GND Keyword:Tundranenzisch; Fokus <Linguistik>; Jukagirisch
Volume:21.2014
Page Number:19
First Page:299
Last Page:317
Dewey Decimal Classification:4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache
4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik
Sammlungen:Linguistik
Linguistik-Klassifikation:Linguistik-Klassifikation: Syntax
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - CC BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International