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Genitive focus in Supyire
(2006)
Supyire has two distinct genitive constructions, one consisting of juxtaposed nouns, and the other marked with a particle. This study demonstrates that the marked genitive correlates significantly in natural discourse with contrastive focus as operationally defined in Myhill and Xing (1996). The method used avoids the vicious circularity of many discourse-based studies of focus. Contrastive focus, rather than being "coded", is a pragmatic construal which is dependent on other elements in the communicative context. This construal is only one of the possible construals of the marked genitive (contra Carlson 1994). In this it is not unlike other so-called "contrastive focus" constructions noted in the literature, such as contrastive stress in English.
These proceedings, also online available as No. 46 in the ZAS Papers in Linguistics series under http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/index.html?publications_zaspil have resulted from the International Conference "Focus in African languages" held October 6-8, 2005 at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin. The conference was cooperatively organized by the latter, together with the Collaborative Research Center (Sonderforschungsforschungsbereich) 632, generously funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). It was the first conference bringing together colleagues working on this topic from all over the world in such scale.
Even though this volume contains only ten contributions out of the 35 papers presented at the conference, it displays the wide range of approaches, subjects and languages studied in the field of information structure in African languages. The collection thus reflects the synergetic atmosphere of the conference.
In the name of all organizers (Laura Downing, Ines Fiedler, Katharina Hartmann, Brigitte Reineke, Anne Schwarz, Sabine Zerbian, Malte Zimmermann) we would like to take this opportunity to thank the participant reviewers and student assistants for their contributions by which the conference became such a fruitful forum for inspiring and seminal studies in this field. Also special thanks for their effort in copy editing to our research assistants Lars Marstaller and Paul Starzmann.