In Place - Out of Place? Focus Strategies in Hausa

The aim of the present study is to provide an account of the different strategies, both syntactic and prosodic, employed by American English and Peninsular Spanish speakers in subject focus marking. Data obtained through parallel experimental designs revealed that prosodic marking of focus in-situ is possible in both languages both for informational and contrastive focus. Nonetheless, in the expression of contrastive focus Peninsular Spanish speakers increase the use of clefting while American English speakers exploit prosodic strategies like creaky voice. Differences in the pitch range implemented on focalized subjects were against the posed prediction. This study, nonetheless, contributes to the lacking cross-linguistic comparisons of these two languages and explores the interconnections between syntax and prosody.

PhD Thesis/Dissertation, 2020

This thesis investigates the information-structural notion of focus through the morphosyntax of focus structures in Mùwe Ké, a Tibeto-Burman language of Mugu, Nepal with roughly five thousand speakers. The focus structures mainly involve the obligatory focus marking of actors with the otherwise-optional ergative marker -gane and a preferred immediately preverbal focus position for focussed terms, both of which are shown to correlate with the notion of focus. This is a common finding for Tibeto-Burman languages since the expression of information structure in the language family has previously been associated with differential case marking, topic and focus marking, word order and the positioning of salient terms. However, in recent years, the very notion of focus as a stable cross-linguistic category has been debated. The research and analyses presented are based on a corpus of field data collected over three years in Nepal and a grammatical sketch of Mùwe Ké is provided first. Following a discussion on the theoretical approaches and notions that are adopted, a description of focus structures in the language is offered and the manifestations of focus are listed. Subsequently, focus as a category is questioned and an alternative approach is outlined using Cognitive Grammar as the theoretical framework to show the underlying processes that are associated with information update. The reanalysis fails to find evidence for a category of focus in the language due to the lack of any clearly identifiable content or a one-to-one correlation between differential ergative marking, the preverbal position and focus. It does, however, show varying interpretative strategies, or focal effects, that may be associated with information structure and which overlap with the notion of focus.

Linguistics, 2011

The article provides an overview of the grammatical realization of focus in four West Chadic languages (Chadic, Afro-Asiatic). The languages discussed exhibit an intriguing crosslinguistic variation in the realization of focus, both among themselves as well as compared to European intonation languages. They also display language-internal variation in the formal realization of focus. The West Chadic languages differ widely in their ways of expressing focus, which range from syntactic over prosodic to morphological devices. In contrast to European intonation languages, the focus marking systems of the West Chadic languages are inconsistent in that focus is often not grammatically expressed, but these inconsistencies are shown to be systematic. Subject foci (contrastive or not) and contrastive nonsubject foci are always grammatically marked, whereas information focus on nonsubjects need not be marked as such. The absence of formal focus marking supports pragmatic theories of focus in terms of contextual resolution. The special status of focused subjects and contrastive foci is derived from the Contrastive Focus Hypothesis, which requires unexpected foci and unexpected focus contents to be marked as such, together with the assumption that canonical subjects in West Chadic receive a default interpretation as topics. Finally, I discuss certain focus ambiguities which are not attested in intonation languages, nor do they follow on standard accounts of focus marking, but which can be accounted for in terms of constraint interaction in the formal expression of focus. (CS4) WDG (155×230mm) TimesNewRoman

2006

2016

The current paper investigates how morphologically marked focus is prosodically realised in Standard Colloquial Assamese (SCA), the standard variety of Assamese. It apart from demonstrating the distribution of morphological focus markers (MFMs) in SCA, highlights their relationship with their host, and their intonational behaviour. Further, the MFM marked focus has been compared with the contrastive focus (CF) realisation. We propose in this study that MFM induced focus is phonologically different from CF realisation.

Papers on Information Structure in African Languages, ed. by Ines Fiedler and Anne Schwarz.ZASPIL-ZAS Papers in Linguistics 46: 185-209., 2006

Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics, 2011

This study investigates the effect of a language-wide lack of pragmatic presuppositions on focus marking (often taken to be inherently presuppositional). The language of investigation is Nɬeʔkepmxcin (Thompson River Salish). I show that discourse participants treat presuppositions triggered by focus in the same way as lexical presuppositions. Addressees do not challenge presuppositions that they do not share (strikingly unlike in English). Speakers, however, typically avoid using presuppositions not shared by the addressee. As a result, speakers avoid using their own utterances to mark narrow focus at all, a striking difference from English. I argue that this is due to another pragmatic constraint subject to cross-linguistic parameterization: while the speaker's own utterance counts as being in the common ground for the purposes of marking presuppositions in English, Salish speakers do not generally mark presuppositions unless they have overt evidence that the addressee shares these presuppositions. This results in a radically different focus marking strategy within a discourse turn as opposed to across discourse turns.

Proceedings of “Sinn und Bedeutung, 2006

The paper investigates the interaction of focus and adverbial quantification in Hausa, a Chadic tone language spoken in West Africa. The discussion focuses on similarities and differences between intonation and tone languages concerning the way in which adverbial quantifiers (AQs) and focus particles (FPs) associate with focus constituents. It is shown that the association of AQs with focused elements does not differ fundamentally in intonation and tone languages such as Hausa, despite the fact that focus marking in Hausa works quite differently. This may hint at the existence of a universal mechanism behind the interpretation of adverbial quantifiers across languages. From a theoretical perspective, the Hausa data can be taken as evidence in favour of pragmatic approaches to the focus-sensitivity of AQs, such as e.g. Beaver & Clark (2003). * This article was written within the project B2 "Focusing in Chadic Languages" funded by the German Science Association (DFG) as part of the SFB 632 "Information Structure". I would like to express my gratitude to the DFG, as well as to my Hausa consultants Malama Aisha Mahmud Abubakar, Malama Sa'adatu Garba, Malam Umar Ibrahim, Malam Rabi'u Shehu, Malam Balarabe Zulyada'ini, as well as Malam Mu'awiya for their patience and willingness to place themselves into ever more bizarre fictitious contexts. I am solely responsible for any errors and omissions.

Proceedings of West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) 34, 2017

This paper argues that Georgian, a language with a fixed structural position reserved for the focused element (immediately preverbal), also uses prosody to signal focus. Specifically, data from a preliminary study reported here shows that various types of foci – wh-questions (WHQ), yes-no questions (YNQ), and contrastive contexts – bear the same prosodic marker of focus: the phrase accent L, rigidly aligned with the penultimate syllable of the predicate. The advantage of the approach advocated here is that it provides a unified account for the prosodic realization of different types of focus in Georgian. The double-marking of the same feature in syntax and prosody raises questions as to why language does not rely on just one of these strategies.

Studies in Language, 2020

Focus and newness are distinct features. The fact that subconstituents of focus can be given or discourse-old has been pointed out in Selkirk (1984) and Lambrecht (1994). Nevertheless, when it comes to Sentence Focus, it is still common to equate Focus with newness, and to treat SF sentences as necessarily all-new. One of the reasons for such bias is that formally or typologically oriented descriptions of SF tend to analyze only intransitive ‘out of the blue’ SF utterances stemming from elicitation. Based on SF utterances in natural speech in Kakabe, a Western Mande language, the present study shows that in natural speech SF utterances are associated with a rich array of discourse strategies. Accordingly, the discourse properties of the referents inside SF are subject to variation and affect the implementation of the focus-marking. The study also shows how the discourse properties of referents define the distribution of the focus marker in Kakabe.

Lingua, 2015

This study explored the prosodic realization of focus in four typologically unrelated languages: American English, Paraguayan Guaraní, Moroccan Arabic, and K'iche'. American English and Paraguayan Guaraní mark prosodic prominence culminatively on the head of the prosodic unit, whereas Moroccan Arabic and K'iche' mark prosodic prominence demarcatively on the right edge of the prosodic unit. To allow for cross-linguistic comparisons, the same interactive task was used for all four languages in their respective countries. Utterances were elicited in which a color-denoting adjective, a shape-denoting noun, or the noun phrase consisting of the adjective and the noun was focused. Data from each language were annotated phonologically using an autosegmental-metrical approach and analyzed acoustically. The results suggest that the prosodic realization of focus is partially orthogonal to the distinction between headprominence and head/edge-prominence languages, and may be due to differences in macro-rhythm. American English and Paraguayan Guaraní, the head-prominence languages, share deaccenting as a means for marking non-focused expressions, but only English uses pitch accent type to mark focused elements. Moroccan Arabic, a head/edge-prominence language, uses phrasing and duration cues to focus, but K'iche', also a head/edge-prominence language, does not. In addition, American English shares phrasing cues, and both American English and Paraguayan Guaraní share duration cues with Moroccan Arabic, despite their structural prosodic differences.

Occasional Papers in Applied Linguistics (OPAL), 2009

The purpose of this paper is to address the application by Zimmermann (2006) of OT syntactic and prosodic constraints to the Hausa language. It is found that subject movement is motivated by the desire to align the subject with the head of an intonational phrase. And this can be accomplished in Hausa by violating lower ranked syntactic constraints (i.e. Stay) or perhaps an economy constraint against structures that require multiple intonational phrases.

Eesti ja soome-ugri keeleteaduse ajakiri, 2020

It is well known that the basic word order pattern of a language is closely intertwined with the syntactic realization of argument focus constituents. SVO languages exhibit a focus position at the sentence's right periphery, SOV languages exhibit an immediately preverbal focus position. The study at hand examines both the basic word order patterns and the syntactic realization of focus in Enets, Nganasan and Dolgan. The major outcome is that Nganasan and Dolgan are much more flexible with respect to their basic word order pattern and, in consequence, exhibit both an immediately preverbal focus position and a right-peripheral focus position, whilst Enets realizes argument focus constituents almost exclusively immediately preverbally.