Tonal focus reflections in Buli and some Gur relatives

  • Buli is an Oti-Volta tone language spoken in Northern Ghana. This paper outlines the basic features of its tonal system and explores whether and in which way pitch respectively phonemic tone is approached as a means to indicate the pragmatic category of focus. Pursued are cases with focus-related surface tone changes as well as cases where pitch could help to disambiguate between broad and narrow foci. It is argued that focus is not consistently encoded by pitch or tone. Parallel findings for the closely related languages Kopen o (phonetic symbol)nni and Dagbani suggest that the apparent lack of significant prosodic focus signals in Buli might pertain to a larger group of tonal languages of the Gur family.

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Metadaten
Author:Anne SchwarzORCiDGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30-1134349
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2007.10.025
ISSN:0024-3841
Parent Title (English):Lingua
Publisher:Elsevier
Place of publication:Amsterdam [u. a.]
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2009/10/13
Date of first Publication:2008/07/31
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2009/10/13
Tag:(Morpho)syntactic focus strategy; Broad focus; Focus ambiguity; Focus marker; Gur; Tone language
GND Keyword:Informationsstruktur
Volume:119
Issue:6
Page Number:23
First Page:950
Last Page:972
Note:
© 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Source:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MImg&_imagekey=B6V6H-4T3TR3J-1-1&_cdi=5815&_user=3846826&_orig=search&_coverDate=06%2F30%2F2009&_sk=998809993&view=c&wchp=dGLbVlW-zSkWA&md5=3b18d81edbd681b7c0ae302e28379ff8&ie=/sdarticle.pdf ; (in:) Lingua, 119, 6,
HeBIS-PPN:219529809
Institutes:keine Angabe Fachbereich / Extern
Dewey Decimal Classification:4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache
Sammlungen:Linguistik
Linguistik-Klassifikation:Linguistik-Klassifikation: Morphologie / Morphology
Licence (German):License LogoArchivex. zur Lesesaalplatznutzung § 52b UrhG