Focus and prominence in Chichewa, Chitumbuka and Durban Zulu
- Much work on the interaction of prosody and focus assumes that, crosslinguistically, there is a necessary correlation between the position of main sentence stress (or accent) and focus, and that an intonational pitch change on the focused element is a primary correlate of focus. In this paper, I discuss primary data from three Bantu languages – Chichewa, Durban Zulu and Chitumbuka – and show that in all three languages phonological re-phrasing, not stress, is the main prosodic correlate of focus and that lengthening, not pitch movement, is the main prosodic correlate of phrasing. This result is of interest for the typology of intonation in illustrating languages where intonation has limited use and where, notably, intonation does not highlight focused information in the way we might expect from European stress languages.
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| Author: | Laura J. Downing |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-310217 |
| URL: | http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/175.html |
| ISSN: | 1435-9588 |
| ISSN: | 0947-7055 |
| Parent Title (English): | Papers in phonetics and phonology, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin; ZASPil Vol. 49, S. 47-65 |
| Publisher: | Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft |
| Place of publication: | Berlin |
| Document Type: | Part of a Book |
| Language: | English |
| Year of Completion: | 2008 |
| Year of first Publication: | 2008 |
| Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
| Release Date: | 2013/11/14 |
| GND Keyword: | Thema-Rhema-Gliederung; Phonologie; Intonation <Linguistik>; Chewa-Sprache; Tumbuka-Sprache; Zulu-Sprache |
| Volume: | 49 |
| Page Number: | 19 |
| First Page: | 47 |
| Last Page: | 65 |
| HeBIS-PPN: | 378087606 |
| Sammlungen: | Linguistik |
| Linguistik-Klassifikation: | Linguistik-Klassifikation: Phonetik/Phonologie / Phonetics/Phonology |
| Zeitschriften / Jahresberichte: | ZAS papers in linguistics : ZASPiL / ZASPiL 49 = Papers in phonetics and phonology |
| : | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-306925 |
| Licence (German): |  Deutsches Urheberrecht |
