Focus Strategies in African Languages: The Interaction of Focus and Grammar in Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic

332 Pages·2007·1.16 MB·English

by  Enoch Oladé Aboh

Focus Strategies in African Languages
≥
Trends in Linguistics
Studies and Monographs 191
Editors
Walter Bisang
(main editor for this volume)
Hans Henrich Hock
Werner Winter
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
Focus Strategies
in African Languages
The Interaction of Focus and Grammar
in Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic
edited by
Enoch Olade´ Aboh
Katharina Hartmann
Malte Zimmermann
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
MoutondeGruyter(formerlyMouton,TheHague)
isaDivisionofWalterdeGruyterGmbH&Co.KG,Berlin.
(cid:2)(cid:2) Printedonacid-freepaperwhichfallswithintheguidelines
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LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Focus strategies in African languages : the interaction of focus and
grammar in Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic / edited by Enoch Olade´
Aboh,KatharinaHartmann,MalteZimmermann.
p.cm.(cid:2)(Trendsinlinguisticsstudiesandmonographs;191)
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
ISBN978-3-11-019593-4(alk.paper)
1.Niger-Congolanguages(cid:2)Grammar. 2.Afroasiaticlanguages(cid:2)
Grammar. 3.Focus(Linguistics) I.Aboh,EnochOlade´. II.Hart-
mann,Katharina. III.Zimmermann,Malte,1970(cid:2)
PL8026.N44F63 2007
4961.36(cid:2)dc22
2007042927
ISBN 978-3-11-019593-4
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Contents
Focus and grammar: The contribution of African languages
Enoch Oladé Aboh, Katharina Hartmann and Malte Zimmermann ........... 1
Part I. Focus and prosody
Nuclear stress in Eastern Benue-Kwa (Niger-Congo)
Victor Manfredi ......................................................................................... 15
Investigating prosodic focus marking in Northern Sotho
Sabine Zerbian .......................................................................................... 55
Part II. Information structure and word order
Preverbal objects and information structure in Benue-Congo
Tom Güldemann ........................................................................................ 83
Focus strategies and the incremental development of semantic
representations: Evidence from Bantu
Lutz Marten .............................................................................................. 113
Part III. Ex-situ and in-situ strategies of focus marking
Ex-situ focus in Kikuyu
Florian Schwarz ....................................................................................... 139
Focus in the Force-Fin system: Information structure in
Cushitic languages
Mara Frascarelli and Annarita Puglielli ................................................. 161
Coptic relative tenses: The Profile of a morpho-syntactic
flagging device
Chris H. Reintges ..................................................................................... 185
vi Contents
Part IV. The inventory of focus marking devices
Identificational operation as a focus strategy in Byali
Brigitte Reineke ........................................................................................ 223
Exhaustivity marking in Hausa: A reanalysis of the particle nee/cee
Katharina Hartmann and Malte Zimmermann ........................................ 241
Part V. Focus and related constructions
Narrative focus strategies in Gur and Kwa
Anne Schwarz and Ines Fiedler ................................................................ 267
Focused versus non-focused wh-phrases
Enoch Oladé Aboh ................................................................................... 287
List of contributors ................................................................................... 315
Subject index ............................................................................................ 317
Language index ........................................................................................ 323
Focus and grammar: The contribution of African
languages
Enoch Oladé Aboh, Katharina Hartmann, and Malte
Zimmermann
Starting with Chomsky (1971) and Jackendoff (1972), the formal study of
information structure and grammar has received an ever increasing interest,
and led to the formulation of various proposals centering on the expression
of focus in natural languages and its function in the architecture of gram-
mar (e.g. Dik 1981, Vallduvi 1990, Cinque 1993, Lambrecht 1994,
Reinhart 1997, Drubig 2007). This book aims at contributing to the ongoing
discussion of focus by investigating a range of African languages hitherto
under-represented in the literature. The volume consists of a selection of
articles that developed from presentations at a Workshop on “Topic and
Focus: Information Structure and Grammar in African Languages” held at
the University of Amsterdam in December 2004.
Notwithstanding the wide range of approaches to focus found in the lit-
erature, the contributions to the present volume all agree on the following
very general notion of focus as a pragmatic category that interacts with
grammar (Jackendoff 1972, Dik 1981, Lambrecht 1994):
(1) Focus refers to that part of the clause that provides the most rele-
vant or most salient information in a given discourse situation.
Typically, an expression will be most relevant or most salient if it is either
new or contrasted with another element in the preceding or subsequent
discourse. The non-focused part of a clause is often referred to as the back-
ground:
(2) Background refers to that part of the clause that contains the pre-
supposed and/ or given information, where givenness implies
having been mentioned in the preceding discourse.
In this volume, the background is also referred to as the out-of-focus part
by some authors (e.g. Reineke, A. Schwarz & Fiedler).
2 Enoch Aboh, Katharina Hartmann and Malte Zimmermann
The information-structural category of focus must be kept apart from the
notion of focus marking, which refers to the overt realization of focus by
special grammatical means, which is subject to cross-linguistic variation:
Languages can mark focus syntactically, or prosodically, or morphologi-
cally, or they can use combinations of these grammatical means. At the
same time, non-contrastive focus is not always marked, as shown by some
of the languages discussed in the present volume.
The articles in this volume look at focus strategies in a variety of Afri-
can languages (Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic) from several theoretical and
methodological perspectives. Their common aim is to deepen our under-
standing of how the information-structural category of focus is represented
and marked in the languages of the world. This inquiry into the focus sys-
tems of African languages will have repercussions on existing theories of
focus because it reveals new focus strategies as well as fine-tuned focus
distinctions that are not discussed in the literature, which is almost exclu-
sively based on intonation languages. Departing from the purely descriptive
studies that we are familiar with when it comes to African languages, this
book is – to our knowledge – unique in its effort to combine careful empiri-
cal study and theoretical analysis of the prosody, morphosyntax, and se-
mantics of focus. Though every single paper in this volume addresses more
than one issue in connection with the interaction of focus and grammar, the
whole collection revolves about the following theoretical and empirical
topics: (i) Focus and prosody; (ii) information structure and word order;
(iii) ex-situ and in-situ strategies of focus marking; (iv) the inventory of
focus marking devices; (v) focus and related constructions.
1. Focus and prosody
Studies on intonation languages (e.g. Germanic, Romance) show that these
use stress assignment (sometimes combined with syntactic transformations)
for marking focus (e.g. Selkirk 1984, 1995). The underlying stress is typi-
cally expressed in form of a nuclear pitch accent, as shown for the follow-
ing English examples (the focused constituent is underlined, the accented
syllable is printed in capitals):
(3) a. Where did Peter buy the cassava?
He bought them at the MARket.
Focus and grammar: The contribution of African languages 3
b. What did Peter buy at the market?
He bought casSAva at the market.
c. Who bought the cassava at the market?
PEter bought them.
In contrast, some African tone languages (e.g. from the Kwa, Gur, Bantu,
and Chadic families) make use of syntactic transformations (e.g. fronting
rules) for the same purpose. A plausible assumption is that the presence of
tone in these languages somehow diminishes the prominence of intonation
(or stress assignment). The following examples from Gungbe would sup-
port this view a priori:
(4) a. Ét(cid:40)(cid:4) w(cid:40)(cid:97) à n(cid:50)(cid:97) sà ?
what FOC 2sg HAB sell
‘What do you habitually sell?’
b. Hwèví w(cid:40)(cid:97) ùn n(cid:50)(cid:97) sà.
fish FOC 1sg HAB sell
‘I sell FISH.’
Things are not so clear-cut however. Kanerva (1990), for example, shows
that focus marking in Nkhotakota Chichewa (Bantu) has an effect on the
prosodic phrasing. In Chichewa, the right-edge of a prosodic phrase is indi-
cated by penultimate lengthening and tone lowering on the phrase-final
vowel, e.g. nyumbá > nyúumba in (5bc). The examples in (5a–c) show that
the expression of focus affects the prosodic phrasing of the Chichewa
clause in that a prosodic phrase boundary must be inserted after the focused
constituent, i.e. after the VP in (5a), after the object NP nyúumba in (5b),
and after the verb anaméenya in (5c), respectively:
(5) a. What did he do? (VP focus)
(anaményá nyumbá ndí mwáála)
he.hit house with rock
‘He hit the house with a rock.’
b. What did he hit with the rock? (object NP focus)
(anaményányuúmba) (ndí mwáála)
c. What did he do to the house with the rock? (V focus)
(anaméenya) (nyuúmba) (ndí mwáála)
4 Enoch Aboh, Katharina Hartmann and Malte Zimmermann
The examples in (5) show that certain tone languages can resort to prosodic
devices for marking focus (see also Yip 2002), giving rise to the following
questions: How do prosodic focus marking and lexical tone interact? To
what extent is prosody inherent to the expression of focus? And do speak-
ers always employ prosodic cues that are associated with the focused ex-
pression?
The articles by Manfredi and Zerbian in this volume address these is-
sues for a number of African tone languages and provide a closer inspec-
tion of the role of prosody in information packaging in these languages.
The two articles take different starting points and come to radically differ-
ent conclusions. Based on a careful experimental study of the prosodic
properties of Northern Sotho, Zerbian shows that prosody plays no role in
the marking of postverbal focus constituents in this language. Manfredi, in
contrast, takes a universalist perspective as his starting point. According to
his analysis, African tone languages do not differ significantly from intona-
tion languages when it comes to focus marking. Universally, focus is
marked by means of abstract stress (prominence), which is spelt out as a
pitch accent in intonation languages and as a high tone in Kimatuumbi and
Luhaya. It remains to be seen whether Manfredi’s analysis can be extended
to Northern Sotho, and if so, how abstract stress is prosodically realized in
this language.
2. Information structure and word order
In many languages, information structure affects word order. Such interac-
tion has been described for so-called discourse-configurational languages
(É. Kiss 1995). In German, for instance, constituents expressing old infor-
mation tend to precede the focus constituent in the middle field, sometimes
leading to reordering of the basic word order (scrambling). For instance, the
unmarked order of indirect object (IO) and direct object (DO) in the neutral
clause in (6a) is IO > DO. However, when the indirect object is focused, it
must follow the backgrounded direct object, as shown in (6b). Notice that
this word order variation correlates with the definiteness/ indefiniteness
distinction:
(6) a. Peter hat einem Mann ein Buch gegeben.
Peter has a man a book given
‘Peter gave a book to a man.’