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This paper, in the context of multilingual MT, proposes the use of ICONS (Individual CONstraintS) to add a representation of information structure to MRS. The value of ICONS is a list of objects of type info-str, each of which has the features CLAUSE and TARGET. The subtypes of info-str indicate which information structural role is played by the TARGET with respect to the CLAUSE. This proposal is designed to support both the calculation of focus projection from underspecified representations and the handling of multiclausal sentences.
Quantifiers canonically attach to nouns or noun phrases as modifiers to specify the amount or number of the entity expressed by the noun. However, it has been observed that quantifiers can be positioned outside of the noun phrase. These so-called floating quantifiers (FQs) exhibit intriguing syntactic and semantic characteristics. On the one hand, they appear to have a closerelationship with a noun; semantically they quantify a noun in the same way as non-floating quantifiers, and quite often they exhibit agreement with the noun. On the other hand, their phrase structure distribution is very similar to that of VP-adverbs. In this paper, we argue that the distribution of FQs is constrained not purely by syntax, but also by information structure. We show that FQs play a focus role whereas modified nouns are reference-oriented topic expressions. Building upon Dalrymple and Nikolaeva's (2011) recent proposal, we formulate the interaction between syntactic, semantic and information structure features of FQs within LFG's projection architecture.
This paper presents a Synchronous Tree Adjoining Grammar (STAG) account of Information Structure, whereby Givenness-marking requires a link between nodes on a syntactic tree and LF nodes whose interpretation is supplied by a contextually determined set of Given semantic objects. By hypothesis, the interpretation of linked nodes bypasses a default interpretation principle that requires pragmatic reasoning to disambiguate elements and enrich semantic material. Thus, interpreting Given elements requires less cognitive effort than Focused elements. This, combined with some established insights from Game-theoretic pragmatics, yields empirical advantages over more traditional semantic/pragmatic analyses of equal simplicity.
This paper hypothesizes that transfer-based machine translation systems can be improved by encoding information structure in both the source and target grammars, and preserving information structure in the transfer stage. We explore how information structure can be represented within the HPSG/MRS formalism (Pollard and Sag, 1994; Copestake et al., 2005) and how it can help refine multilingual MT. Building upon that framework, we provide a sample translation between English and Japanese and check the feasibility of the proposals in small-scale translation systems built with the HPSG/MRS-based LOGON MT infrastructure (Oepen et al., 2007). Our experiment shows the information structure-based MT system that we propose in this paper reduces the number of translations 75.71% for Japanese and 80.23% for Korean. The dramatic reductions in the number of translations is expected to make a contribution to our HPSG/MRS-based MT in terms of latency as well as accuracy.
My objective here is to assess the relevance of information structural notions for analyzing subject inversion in French. Subject inversion is not a unified phenomenon. In fact, there are three distinct constructions featuring an inverted subject. I show that the sentences do not have the same informational potential (the type of focus-ground articulation they are compatible with) depending on the construction they abide by. I propose a contextual factor – the informational solidarity between the verb and its first argument – to account for those differences. Then, I show that the three constructions share a common feature that pertains to a completely different dimension: the perspective chosen to describe the situation. I adopt Langacker's notion of absolute construal to characterize it. Finally, I present another common feature: the blocking of the referential anchoring of the referent of indefinite and partitive NPs.
In this article we show how the HPSG approach to information structure of De Kuthy (2002) and De Kuthy and Meurers (2003) can be extended to capture givenness (Schwarzschild, 1999) and make the right predictions for so-called deaccenting of given information, a widespread phenomenon not previously dealt with in HPSG.
Based on Krifka (1992) and de Kuthy (2000), this paper develops an architecture for complex topic-comment structures in HPSG and applies it to predicate fronting in English with the goal of capturing the insights of Ward (1988) on this construction. We argue that predicate fronting is a distributed constructional form consisting of an auxiliary occurring in a predicate preposing phrase. The use of predicate preposing is a function of a combination of simultaneous constraints on its theme structure, its background-focus distribution, and its presuppositional structure. It is shown that these constraints can be made explicit within the HPSG architecture developed here.
This paper provides a constraint-based account of information-prosody correspondence within the HPSG framework. The starting point of the paper is Klein's (2000) account of prosodic constituency in HPSG. However, it departs from the standard syntactocentric architecture of grammar, and adopts a grammar design in which syntax, phonology, and information structure are generated in parallel, with all three applying to a common list of domain objects. It is shown that this theoretical architecture elegantly captures many of the various constraints that have been shown to hold in classical views of grammar.
This paper is concerned with such concepts as topic, focus and cognitive status of discourse referents, which have been included under the label information structure (alternatively information status), as they are related in some sense to the distribution of given and new information. It addresses the question of which information structural properties are best accounted for by grammatical constraints and which can be attributed to non-linguistic constraints on the way information is processed and communicated. Two logically independent senses of given-new information are distinguished, one referential and the other relational. I discuss some examples of linguistic phenomena that pertain to each of these different senses and show that both are linguistically relevant and must be represented in the grammar. I also argue that phenomena related to both senses have pragmatic effects that do not have to be represented in the grammar since they result from interaction of the language system with general pragmatic principles that constrain inferential processes involved in language production and understanding.
The paper investigates a complex word order phenomenon in German and the interaction of syntax and information structure it exemplifies: the occurrence of subjects as part of a fronted non-finite constituent and particularly the so-called definiteness effect excluding (many) definite subjects from this position. We explore the connection between focus projection and the partial fronting cases and show that it is the subject of those verbs which allow their subject to be the focus exponent that can be included as part of a fronted verbal constituent. In combination with the observation by Webelhuth (1990) that fronted verbal constituents need to be focused, this provides a natural explanation of the definiteness effect in terms of the information structure requirements in these sentences. Interestingly, the generally ignored exceptions to the definiteness effect are predicted by our analysis; we show that they involve definite noun phrases which can bear focus, which allows them to be part of a fronted verbal constituent. Finally, building on the integrated grammatical architecture provided in De Kuthy (2002), we formulate an HPSG theory which captures the interaction of constraints from syntax, information structure and intonation.
This paper investigates a particular word order phenomenon in German, the occurrence of discontinuous NPs (which we refer to as the NP-PP split construction) in order to probe the division of labor between the syntactic analysis and discourse constraints on this construction. We argue that some of the factors which previous literature has tried to explain in terms of syntactic restrictions are in fact derivable from discourse factors. Building on these insights, we show how an information structure component can be integrated into an HPSG account of the phenomenon.
This paper discusses the typology of focus structure types (variation of information structuring in the clause) and how information structure can be used to explain all of the word order patterns in Chinese without reference to grammatical relations.
The present investigation steps back to the claims of the 1990s by assuming that there is a functional opposition in the use of P- and D-PRO which affects the status of the pronoun's referent in the mental model of the discourse. We interpret the earlier findings as an indication of an information structural difference which is specifically relevant on the discourse level. The question we address here is twofold. Firstly, we ask whether the assumed opposition in the information status of P- and D-PRO referents has consequences on referent continuation in the ongoing discourse. So far, the effects of P- vs. D-PRO use were determined concerning the status of the pronoun referent in the actual sequence of discourse, i.e. they were determined by a judgement on the salience or the topic/focus status of the pronominal DP. As far as we can see, this determination has not been operationalized further. Since there are contexts in which both P- and D-PRO would fit in with only a feeling of a difference but without clear-cut exclusiveness, the opposition is empirically not well validated. If we could show that there are effects of type of pronoun on the ongoing discourse this would, in our view, provide the lacking empirical validation. Secondly, we ask whether there are effects of the narrator's point of view on P- and D-PRO use. The idea behind this question is that the way of information unfolding in discourse depends on the speaker. S/he decides which pieces of information come next, what is foreground and what is background information. If type of pronoun choice is related to the processes of discourse organization by the speaker – via fore- and backgrounding of information – and if internal or external location of the narrator's point of view influences the organization strategies of the speaker/narrator this might have an ffect on the use of P- and D-PRO.
This paper investigates what factors make a particular referent a good antecedent for subsequent pronominal reference. In particular, it explores two seemingly conflicting claims in the literature regarding the effects of topicality and focusing on referent salience. In light of new experimental results combined with a review of existing work, I conclude that neither topicality nor focusing alone can explain referent salience as indicated by patterns of pronoun reference. Rather, the data provide support for a multiple-factor model of salience (e.g. Arnold 1999). More specifically, the results show that grammatical role has a striking effect: being a subject makes a referent more salient than either pronominalization/givenness or focusing alone. Furthermore, the results of the experiment suggest that the likelihood of subsequent pronominal reference is also influenced by structural focusing and pronominalization, but not as strongly as by subjecthood. I argue that these data are best captured by a multiple-factor model in which factors differ in how influential they are relative to one another, i.e. how heavily weighted they are. A single-factor system does not seem adequate for these data.
On the syntax and pragmatics interface : Left-peripheral, medial and right-peripheral focus in greek
(2004)
The present paper explores the extent to which narrow syntax is responsible for the computation of discourse functions such as focus/topic. More specifically, it challenges the claim that language approximates ‘perfection’ with respect to economy, conceptual necessity and optimality in design by reconsidering the roles and interactions of the different modules of the grammar, in particular of syntax and phonology and the mapping between the two, in the representation of pragmatic notions. Empirical and theoretical considerations strongly indicate that narrow syntax is ‘blind’ to properties and operations involving the interpretive components — that is, PF and LF. As a result, syntax-phonology interface rules do not ‘see’ everything in the levels they connect. In essence, the architecture of grammar proposed here from the perspective of focus marking necessitates the autonomy of the different levels of grammar, presupposing that NS is minimally structured only when liberated from any non-syntactic/discourse implementations, i.e., movement operations to satisfy both interface needs. As a result, the model articulated here totally dispenses with discourse projections, i.e. FocusP.
In this paper topic and focus effects at both left and right periphery are argued to be epiphenomena of general properties of tree growth. We incorporate Korean into this account as a prototypical verb-final language, and show how long- and short-distance scrambling form part of this general picture. Multiple long-distance scrambling effects emerge as a consequence of the feeding relationship between different forms of structural under-specification. We also show how the array of effects at the right periphery, in both verb-final and other language-types, can also be explained with the same concepts of tree growth. In particular the Right Roof Constraint, a well-known but little understood constraint, is an immediate consequence of compositionality constraints as articulated in this system.
Chicheŵa, a Bantu language of East Central Africa, displays mixed properties of configurationality such as the existence of VP, on the one hand, and discontinuous constituents (DCs), on the other. In the present work we examine the discourse and syntactic properties of DCs, and show that DCs in Chicheŵa arise naturally from the discourse-configurational nature of the language. We argue that the fronted DCs in Chicheŵa are contrastive topics that appear in a leftdislocated external topic position, with the remnant part of the split NP in the right-dislocated topic position. Once the precise discourse functions of DCs are properly integrated into the syntactic analysis, all the facts and restrictions observed in Chicheŵa DCs can be explained in a straightforward fashion.
In his 1995 monograph, Apresyan suggests that it would be extremely interesting to investigate the means of expressing the definiteness/indefiniteness opposition in languages that do not have articles. In this paper, I will attempt to find possible correlations between the organization of discourse and the positions in which the (in)definite nominals may appear within a sentence of Russian. I will examine the information structure of Russian sentences and, based on the previous analyses, provide a new account of their organization with respect to information packaging. I will then look at various nominal elements contained in certain parts of a sentence and arrive at a system describing the distribution of NPs in Russian with respect to the information structure. The ultimate goal of this paper is to establish and motivate a system of correlations between various types of NPs and functions of information structure. This goal will be achieved by determining which characteristic of a NP may serve as a criterion allowing to provide a one-to-one mapping.
Sentence mood in German is a complex category that is determined by various components of the grammatical system. In particular, verbal mood, the position of the finite verb and the wh-characteristics of the so called 'Vorfeld'-phrase are responsible for the constitution of sentence mood in German. This article proposes a theory of sentence mood constitution in German and investigates the interaction between the pronominal binding of indefinite noun phrases which are semantically analyzed as choice functions. It is shown that the semantic objects determined by sentence mood define different kinds of domains which have to be uniquely accessible as the range of the choice function. The various properties of the pronominal binding of indefinites can be derived by the interplay of the proposed theoretical notions.
The goal of this paper is to study the influence of information structure in the referential status of linguistic expressions such as bare plurals and indefinite NPs in Spanish. In particular, we will argue for the following claims: (a) Spanish bare plurals can receive a generic interpretation in object position and (b) Spanish bare plurals in object position can be topics in siru. We will focus on object position because of the well known semantic and syntactic constraints that affect preverbal subject bare plurals in Spanish.
Although the linear order of arguments (and adverbials) in German is relatively free, it underlies certain restrictions; these don’t apply to the so-called unmarked order for arguments (Lenerz 1977) and adverbials (Frey/Pittner 1998). It is a common assumption to take the unmarked order as basic and derive all other orders from it by scrambling, whatever its specific characteristics may be (cf., amongst others, Haider/Rosengren 1998). The observable restrictions obtaining for some linear ordering may then be considered as constraints on a movement operation (scrambling). [...] In the following, I will try to present the outlines of a possible explanation for the restriction, based on a proposal governing the proper referential interpretation of indefinite NPs.
Current analyses of specificity are unable to provide an explanatory account for why specific and nonspecific uses of indefinites are available. While Abusch (1994), Reinhart (1997), and Kratzer (1998) provide successful mechanisms for deriving specific readings, they do not provide a fundamental explanation for the availability of this mechanism. This is due to the fact that specific indefinites are treated as involving an interpretive component or procedure unique to themselves: storage (Abusch) or choice function (Reinhart and Kratzer), for example. It would be preferable if specific indefinites could be understood as deriving from the use of independently motivated meaning components and interpretive mechanisms.
Here I will pursue the idea, building on Portner & Yabushita (1998), that specificity has to do with the indefinite's interaction with a topical domain (note similarities with the proposals of Enç 1991, Cresti 1995, and Schwarzschild 2000). In this conception, specificity is a matter of degree: the narrower the topical domain, the more specific the indefinite. More precisely, sentences containing specific indefinites will be understood as involving ordinary existential quantification in combination with a topical domain function.
Previous work examining the role of antecedent accessibility in pronominal coreference has often linked coreference to prominent structural positions that in turn are linked to information structure statuses such as topic. Three experiments examine the influence of topichood independently of structural prominence by exploring the influence of the pragmatic notion of aboutness on the written production of pronominal coreferring expressions. The results show that being mentioned in an about-phrase increases the likelihood that a referent will be selected as the future topic of a following sentence as well as increasing the proportion of responses with early, pronominal coreference to that referent, at the expense of coreference with the subject. These results suggest that coreference is sensitive to the status of other, structurally non-prominent referents in discourse, and that the pragmatic notion of aboutness influences pronominal coreference.
The filling of the 'Vorfeld' in German sentences is basically obligatory; which constituent, however, actually moves to the Vorfeld is underdetermined by syntax and thus governed presumably by discourse factors. Coming from English, there are certain competing expectations one could have: either the topic — more specifically, the backward-looking center — of a sentence is moved to the Vorfeld, or an element in a poset relationship to a set mentioned in the previous discourse, or elements with other functions, such as the exposition of brand-new information or the setting of a scene. A study of a corpus of texts of different stylistic levels showed that indeed all elements expected to appear in the Vorfeld are eligible for Vorfeld-movement, but that there is a strict ranking. Preferred Vorfeld-fillers are phrases containing brand-new information as well as scene-setting elements; only if no such elements are present can elements in a poset relationship with some previously mentioned set be moved to the Vorfeld. Finally, if such elements are not present either, backward-looking centers can move to the Vorfeld. Backward-looking centers have, for this reason, a relatively poor quota among Vorfeld-fillers, namely around 50%.
This paper proposes a new strategy for accounting for the narrow scope readings of quantificational contrastive topics in Hungarian, which is based on a consideration of the types of questions that declaratives with such contrastive topics can be uttered as partial or complete congruent answers to. The meaning of the declaratives with contrastive topics will be represented with the help of the structured meaning approach to matching questions proposed in Krifka 2002.
In this paper I argue that there are three distinct constructions in Modern German in which a 'topic constituent' is detached to the left: (left-)dislocated topic ('left dislocation'), (left-)attached topic ('mixed left dislocation'), and (left-)hanging topic ('hanging topic'). Presupposing the framework of Integrational Linguistics, I provide syntactic and semantic analyses for them. In particular, I propose that these constructions involve the syntactic function (syntactic) topic, which relates the topic constituent to the remaining part of the sentence. Dislocated and attached topic constituents function in addition as a strong or weak (syntactic) antecedent of some resumptive 'd-pronoun' form.
Dislocated topic, attached topic, and hanging topic are in turn contrasted with 'free topics'. Being sentential units of their own, the latter are syntactically unconnected to the following sentence. In particular, they are not topic constituents.
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.
The aim of this paper is to investigate Rizzi's (2001) recent claim that in combien constructions full movement correlates with a specific or D-linking interpretation of the nominal (see also Obenauer, 1994) while the in-situ option corresponds to focus of the noun. On the one hand, it is argued that the notion of specificity or D-linking for the raised nominal is too strong while on the other hand it is shown that the stranded nominal is not a focus, but a topic, albeit of a special kind. It is also argued that there is a dedicated postverbal position for this kind of topic and that the nominal has all the properties of an incorporated nominal: it is interpreted as an asserted background topic. In the final part of the article, some time is spent discussing the pragmatics and the modality involved in discontinous structures, and showing that the stranded nominal is interpreted inside the VP/below the event variable.
This paper will examine the role of various factors in affecting the salience, and hence the accessibility to pronominal reference, of entities introduced into a discourse by a full clause. We begin with the premise that the possibility of pronominal reference with it versus that depends on the cognitive status of the referent, in the sense of Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski (1993). This formulation of the problem provides grounds for an explanation of the data presented above, and provides a framework within which we examine the role of various other factors in promoting the salience of a clausally introduced entity, including the information structure of the utterance in which the entity is introduced. For entities introduced by clausal complements to bridge verbs, we show that the information structure of the utterance introducing the entity has a partial, or one-sided, effect on the salience of the entity. When the complement clause is focal, the salience of the entity depends only on its referential givenness-newness (in the sense of Gundel 1988, 1999b), as we would expect. But when the complement clause is ground material, the salience of an entity introduced by the clause is enhanced. Other factors, including the presuppositionality of factive and interrogative complements, also serve to enhance the salience of entities introduced by complement clauses.
This volume comprises papers that were given at the workshop Information Structure and the Referential Status of Linguistic Expressions, which we organized during the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) Conference in Leipzig in February 2001. At this workshop we discussed the connection between information structure and the referential interpretation of linguistic expressions, a topic mostly neglected in current linguistics research. One common aim of the papers is to find out to what extent the focus-background as well as the topic-comment structuring determine the referential interpretation of simple arguments like definite and indefinite NPs on the one hand and sentences on the other.
This paper employs empirical methods to examine verbs such as seem, for which the traditional raising to subject analysis relates pairs of sentences which differ by taking an infinitival or sentential complement. A corpus-driven investigation of the verbs seem and appear demonstrates that information structure and evidentiality both play a determinate role in the choice between infinitival or sentential complementation. The second half of the paper builds upon the corpus results and examines the implications for the standard claims concerning these constructions. First, pairs of sentences related by the subject-to-subject raising analysis of verbs are often viewed as equivalent. New evidence from indefinite generic subjects shows that whether an indefinite generic subject occurs in the infinitival or sentential complement construction leads to truth-conditional differences. Further implications are explored for the claim that subjects of the infinitival variant may take narrow-scope: once various confounds are controlled for, the subject of the infinitival construction is shown to most naturally take wide-scope.
'Correction' is the name of a sentence with contrastive focus' the phonological/phonetic realization of which is a single contrastive pitch accent. These sentences predominantly appear in (fictional) dialogues. The first speaker uses grammatical entities against which the next speaker protests with a sentence nearly identical except that it contains a prosodically marked corrective element. This paper makes contrastive focus visible by means of 'KF' (contrastive focus).
This paper focuses on definite descriptions. It will be shown that a definite description refers to a given discourse referent if the descriptive content is completely deaccented. But if there is a focussed element within the descriptive content it introduces a novel referent. This amounts to allowing two readings for definite descriptions without, however, allowing two readings for the definite article.
This paper is about the semantics of wh-phrases. It is argued that wh-phrases should not be analyzed as indefinites as, for example, Karttunen (1977) and many others have done, but as functional expressions with an indefinite core -their function being to restrict possible focus/background structures in direct or congruent answers. This will be argued for on the basis of observations made with respect to the distribution of term answers in well-formed question/answer sequences. This claim having been established, it will be integrated in a categorial variant of Schwarzschild's (1999) information-theoretic approach to F-marking and accent placement, and – second – its consequences with respect to the focus/background structure of wh-questions will be outlined.
Ziel dieses Artikels ist es, allgemeine Frage- und Problemstellungen bei der Untersuchung des Phänomens Fokus in ausgewählten Gur- und Kwasprachen vorzustellen, d.h. unsere Forschungsvorhaben kurz zu skizzieren, ohne dass wir bereits auf Ergebnisse eingehen können. Dieser Aufsatz gibt einen Überblick über das Forschungsfeld, damit verbundene Problemstellungen und die von uns anvisierten Aufgaben und Methoden: - Was verstehen wir unter Fokus? - Warum sind die Gur- und Kwasprachen für diese Untersuchung von Relevanz? - Welche Korrelationen lassen sich zwischen Struktur und semantisch/pragmatischen Merkmalen erkennen? - Welche Entwicklung haben Fokusstrukturen genommen? - Welche methodischen Grundlagen liegen unseren Untersuchungen zugrunde?
Fokus im Aja
(1998)
Im folgenden Beitrag sollen die verschiedenen Möglichkeiten der Markierung von Fokus im Aja dargestellt werden. Das Aja, oder Ajagbe, umfaßt eine Gruppe von Varietäten, die zum Gbe-Kontinuum, von Westermann als Ewe bezeichnet, gehören. Die im Beitrag herangezogenen Daten stammen aus dem Hwe- sowie dem Dogbo-Dialekt (Daten von Tchitchi 1984) des Aja, die im Süden Benins und Togos gesprochen werden.
Im folgenden Beitrag werden die Möglichkeiten der Bildung des Progressivs im Aja dargestellt sowie die zur Bildung des Progressivs verwendeten Formen in ihrer Grammatikalisierungskette vorgestellt. Das Aja gehört zu einer Gruppe von Sprachen/Dialekten, die lange Zeit unter dem Begriff "Ewe" zusammengefaßt wurden, in jüngster Zeit aber auch als Gbe(-Kontinuum) bezeichnet werden. Dabei ist "Gbe" ein in allen sprachlichen Einheiten des Kontinuums anzutreffendes Lexem mit der Bedeutung "Sprache".
Focus expressions in Yom
(2006)
This paper deals with the means for expressing the pragmatic category of focus in Yom, which is an Oti-Volta language of the Yom-Nawdem group spoken by about 74,000 people (Gordon 2005, online version) in the department of Donga in Northern Benin. The study is based on results of my field research carried out in March/April 2005 in Djougou (Benin), within the framework of the project “Focus in Gur and Kwa languages”. Main aim of this fieldwork was to study the expression of focus in Yom. Regarding the basic grammatical structure of the language, I mainly rely on various publications by Beacham (1969, 1991, and 1997).
Low tone spreading in Buli
(2003)
In Buli, tone indicates lexical information as well as grammatical information. The changing of tone patterns regularly observed on lexemes is covered best by an autosegmental approach with autonomous tonal and segmental tiers. It reveals considerable deviations between underlying and surfacing tones at several morpho- yntactic points. Realization of tone is sometimes oppressed or delayed. Cause for such disturbances is in all cases a low tone which spreads to the right and affects following high tones with different results. The aim of this paper is to show how L spreading acts and how it is integrated in the system of tonal contrast.
Welchen Bedingungen unterliegt menschliche Kommunikation? Welche sprachlichen Mittel verwendet ein Sprecher um sicherzustellen, dass sein Zuhörer tatsächlich das versteht, was er kommunizieren möchte? Wie also »verpacken« wir wichtige und weniger wichtige Informationen im alltäglichen Diskurs? Diesen und anderen Fragen geht der SFB 632 »Informationsstruktur«, ein gemeinsames Forschungsunternehmen von Linguisten verschiedener Teildisziplinen der Universität Potsdam und der Humboldt-Universität, nach.
This article discusses the divergent status of the two particles lé and lá in the grammar of Konkomba, a Gur language (Niger-Congo) of the Gurma subgroup. While previous studies claim that both particles are focus markers, this author argues that only the particle lá should be analyzed as a pure pragmatic device. Distributional studies suggest that the use of particle lé, on the other hand, is only required under specific focus conditions, and primarily represents a syntactic device.
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.
0. Introduction 1. Observations concerning the structure of morphosyntactically marked focus constructions 1.1 First observation: SF vs. NSF asymmetry 1.2 Second observation: NSF-NAR parallelism 1.3 Affirmative ex-situ focus constructions (SF, NSF), and narrative clauses (NAR) 2. Grammaticalization 2.1 Cleft hypothesis 2.2 Movement hypothesis 2.3 Narrative hypothesis 2.3.1 Back- or Foregrounding? 2.3.2 Converse directionality of FM and conjunction 3. Language specific analysis 4. Conclusionary remarks References
Focus expressions in Yom
(2005)
In our presentation we will outline the verb system of Lelemi and concentrate on certain “focal” aspects which are of primary interest to us. Lelemi has two TAMP paradigms: one constituting the so-called “simple tenses”, the other the so-called “relative tenses” (Allan 1973), although not every “simple tense” has a counterpart in the “relative tenses”. The simple paradigm is formed by subject prefixes (prefixed pronouns for 1st or 2nd person and noun class pronouns for 3rd persons) and the verb form whereas the relative paradigm is build up by the obligatory use of an external subject noun, an invariable verb prefix, and the verb form. While the simple paradigm is used in quite a lot of syntactic environments the relative paradigm only shows up in relative clauses with the subject being the head as well as in subject and sentence focus constructions including questions concerning the subject. We will show some interesting interactions between the grammatical expression of focus and the verb system and sketch the grammaticalisation path of the morpheme nà.
Research on adverbials in sentence-medial position in the North- Ghanaian Gur language Buli suggests that the language offers two divergent slots for adverbials between subject and verb. Special attention is paid to the group of sentence-medial deictic temporal adverbials. While they have the potential to develop into tense markers, this process seems to depend on special information structural conditions.
Focus in Gur and Kwa
(2006)
The project investigates focus phenomena in the two genetically relatedWest African Gur and Kwa language groups of the Niger-Congo phylum. Most of its members are tone languages, they are similar with respect to word order typology (all are SVO languages), but of divergent morphological type (agglutinating Gur versus isolating Kwa).
Focus expressions in Foodo
(2006)
This talk concerns the copula system in Buli, a Ghanaian language which has also been attested in Bahia (Rodrigues 1935, Zwernemann 1968). Special focus will be put on the categorization of two copula-reminiscent elements for which I will propose a discoursepragmatic analysis.