The pragmatics of focus in Tsou and Seediq

1982

In order to say anything sensible about where 'focus' came from, we have to know 1) what focus is, and 2) whether words marked by 'focus' affixes in Philippine languages are nouns or verbs. In this paper, we will use the term focus to refer to a system of verbal affixes used to indicate the case relation of the subject of a sentence. Most modern linguists working on Philippine languages, from Bloomfield and Blake on up to recent studies by the Summer Institute of Linguistics people and lexicase grammarians such as Harmon and De Guzman, have assumed almost without question that 'focused' words are verbs. The correctness of this conclusion is however not immediately obvious. Cecilio Lopez (1941) and A. Capell (1964) both consider all Philippine 'passive' verbs to be verbal nouns. Capell based his conclusion essentially on the fact that agents in these constructions appear in the Genitive case form. Similar conclusions have been drawn for analogous reasons about passive verbs in Atayal (Egerod 1966:346) and Toba Batak (Van der Tuuk 1971), and about one of two types of 'passive' construction in Rukai (Li 1973: 202-211). Ferrell (1974:5-8) raises this possibility for Paiwan, but rejects it for semantic and pedagogical reasons, although he concedes that his decision is based on a 'lingua-centric view'. McKaughan (1962:49, note 8) also rejects a nominal analysis because nouns should not be marked for tense, aspect, and voice. Similarly, Schachter and Otanes say that all basic Tagalog sentences are essentially equational in nature (1972:62; cf. p. 117; cf. also Dahl 1973:117-118). However, they treat basic sentences as verbal because they find a verbal treatment to be more 'convenient'. We don't find the arguments in the preceding paragraph very persuasive. 'Convenience', pedagogical or otherwise, has no status as a scientific criterion, and the use

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.

The many faces of Austronesian voice systems: some …, 2005

This paper sets out to accomplish the following three goals: 1) To show that Tagalog possesses regular syntactic expressions of the universal pragmatic relations focus and topic.

This paper has discussed the dynamics of competing layers of prominence in Balinese from a modular LFG-like parallel-based perspective. In our analysis, grammar in use in a given context is dynamics, reconciling two opposing pressures. The language-external pressure of discourse-information structure reflects the speaker-hearer's cognitive attentional salience for effective communication, in which C-TOPIC/C-FOCUS have been identified as highly salient. It interacts with clause-internal pressure 'projected' by the head predicate, constrained by the Balinese lexico-grammar of the grammatical voice system. We have seen the significance of lexical conceptual semantics and the related prominence of different kinds such as agentivity/affectedness plays out, interacting with animacy hierarchy and definiteness in determining a possible/impossible realisation of an argument. The speech-level system is a social deixis alternating system, primarily lexical in nature. It interacts with the grammatical voice, indirectly constraining an argument expression only the referential index of an argument is identical with a social index in a given context. Throughout the paper, we have examined the nature of each layer’s prominence, and also how each of them interacts with one another in resolving the opposing pressures, through preferred/dispreferred linking. The crucial findings include the evidence for PIVOT/SUBJ as an overlay grammatical function, most prominent clause-internally, and for C-FOCUS as the most prominent clause-external Discourse Function (DF). Its linking is obligatory in a highly marked structure such as in fronted question word. In addition to AV-UV symmetrical voice alternation, we have also scrutinised prominence instances in other alternative argument realisations exhibited by middle voice marking, (analytic) reflexivisation, and the puzzling realisation of the actor argument due to definiteness and animacy. The Balinese data points reveal the complexity of prominence interaction in the interfaces of (sub)layers of the linguistic system. The competing prominence across layers may give rise to a non-harmonious (possibly unacceptable) linking. We have proposed an OT-style analysis to account for the intriguing facts of permissible/prohibited prominence interaction in Balinese.

1991

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.

2012

In the literature of Philippine linguistics, Goal-Focus (GF) constructions in Tagalog have been generally considered as transitive, both syntactically and semantically; however, whether Actor-Focus (AF) constructions should be analyzed as syntactically transitive or intransitive is controversial. This paper addresses the question of the syntactic transitivity of Tagalog AF constructions from a new perspective. We argue two points in this paper. First, AF constructions do not form a homogenous construction type but rather consist of both syntactically and semantically varying construction types: ambient, agentive, patientive, reflexive, and antipassive types. Moreover, AF construction types other than antipassive are clearly intransitive. This means that only antipassive AF constructions should be examined in a discussion of the syntactic transitivity of AF constructions. Second, it is argued that antipassive AF constructions are syntactically intransitive; specifically, in this construction type, nominative agent NPs behave like grammatical arguments of GF constructions, but genitive patient NPs do not. It is concluded that Tagalog AF constructions are best analyzed as syntactically intransitive.

Perspectives on information structure in Austronesian languages, 2018

In this paper, we look into the interaction between focus and prosody in Tagalog. In this language, for most focus conditions regular correspondences between syntax and information structure are observed: canonical constructions are used for sentence focus and predicate focus conditions, while pseudocleft constructions are used for argument focus conditions. However, some wh-questions, in particular targeting non-agent arguments, can be answered by means of canonical constructions as well as pseudocleft constructions. In this experimental study, we examine production data in order to test how Tagalog speakers prosodically distinguish canonical sentences associated with different focus structures. The results reveal that F0 cues and intensity consistently differentiate focused conditions from all-old utterances throughout the entire sentence. However, the distinct focus conditions are not prosodically differentiated. As for the argument focus condition, there may be dura-tional effects applying to the phrase in narrow focus, but this needs further confirmation.

Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, 2016

Avatime is a Kwa language spoken in Ghana. It has a focus construction in which the focused element is placed in clause-initial position and marked with an extra-high tone. In this paper I discuss the functions of this focus construction, mostly based on a corpus of spontaneous discourse. The focus construction can mark focus on subjects, objects, adjuncts and verbs. Focus marking is usually interpreted as narrow focus on the focus-marked element, but the focus may be wider. Focus marking is not obligatory. In answers to questions, it is rarely used, except when the focused element is the subject. In other contexts, the focus construction is mostly used for contrastive purposes, indicating there are alternatives to the focused element or that the focused element is unexpected. These functions can be unified in the definition of focus marking as highlighting the common-ground update.

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.