Focus marking in Kikuyu

Im Kikuyu, einer in Kenia gesprochenen Bantusprache, wird Fokus systematisch durch Wortstellung markiert. In dieser Arbeit werden die verschiedenen Varianten der Markierung von Fokus in Frage-Antwortsequenzen dargestellt. Nach einem Überblick über in der Literatur vorhandene Diskussionen des Phänomens wird auf der Grundlage von mit einem Muttersprachler erhobenen Daten eine syntaktische Analyse von Fokuskonstruktionen mit der Partikel ne vorgeschlagen. Ferner werden neue Daten zur Fokussierung verschiedener Satzteile, z.B. der VP, des ganzen Satzes und des Wahrheitswerts, präsentiert. Ziel der Arbeit ist somit, die deskriptive Datenbasis zu Fokuskonstruktionen im Kikuyu zu erweitern und einen theoretischen Beitrag zu ihrer Analyse im Rahmen der generativen Grammatik zu liefern. Die Arbeit wurde im Sommer 2003 als Magisterarbeit an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, angenommen.In Kikuyu, a Bantu language spoken in Kenya, focus is marked systematically by means of word order. In this study, the different possibilities for marking focus in question answer sequences are presented. After an overview of the discussions of the phenomenon in the literature, a syntactic account for focus constructions with the particle ne is proposed. This account is based on original data that was gathered with a native speaker. In addition, new data on focusing different parts of the sentence, e.g. the VP, the entire sentence, or the truth-value, are presented. The aim of this study thus is to broaden the descriptive basis for focus constructions in Kikuyu and to provide a theoretical contribution to their analysis in the framework of generative grammar

Focus asymmetries in Bura

This article presents the central aspects of the focus system of Bura (Chadic), which exhibits a number of asymmetries: Grammatical focus marking is obligatory only with focused subjects, where focus is marked by the particle án following the subject. Focused subjects remain in situ and the complement of án is a regular VP. With nonsubject foci, án appears in a cleft-structure between the fronted focus constituent and a relative clause. We present a semantically unified analysis of focus marking in Bura that treats the particle as a focusmarking copula in T that takes a property-denoting expression (the background) and an individual-denoting expression (the focus) as arguments. The article also investigates the realization of predicate and polarity focus, which are almost never marked. The upshot of the discussion is that Bura shares many characteristic traits of focus marking with other Chadic languages, but it crucially differs in exhibiting a structural difference in the marking of focus on subjects and non-subject constituents

Az adverbiumok mondattani és jelentéstani kérdései = The syntax and syntax-semantics interface of adverbial modification

A határozószók és a határozók alaktani, mondattani és funkcionális kérdéseit vizsgáltuk a generatív nyelvelmélet keretében, főként magyar anyag alapján. Olyan leírásra törekedtünk, melyből a különféle határozófajták mondattani viselkedése, hatóköre, valamint hangsúlyozása egyaránt következik. A különféle határozótípusok PP-ként való elemzésének lehetőségét bizonyítottuk. A határozók mondatbeli elhelyezése tekintetében a specifikálói pozíció (Cinque 1999) ellen és az adjunkciós elemzés (Ernst 2002) mellett érveltünk. Megmutattuk, hogy a határozók szórendjének levezetéséhez bal- és jobboldali adjunkció feltételezése egyaránt szükséges. A különféle határozófajták szórendi helyét mondattani, jelentéstani és prozódiai tényezők összjátékával magyaráztuk. A jelentéstani tényezők között pl. a határozók inkorporálhatóságát korlátozó típusmegszorítást, a negatív határozók kötelező fókuszálását előidéző skaláris megszorítást, egyes határozófajták és igefajták komplex eseményszerkezetének inkompatibilitását vizsgáltuk. Az ige mögötti határozók szórendjét befolyásoló prozódiai tényező például a növekvő összetevők törvénye. Megfigyeltük az intonációskifejezés- újraelemzés kiváltódásának feltételeit és jelentéstani következményeit is. A helyhatározói igekötők egy típusát a mozgatási láncok sajátos fonológiai megvalósulásaként (a fonológiailag redukált kópia inkorporációjaként) elemeztük. A tárgykörben mintegy 60 tanulmányt publikáltunk. Adverbs and Adverbial Adjuncts at the Interfaces (489 old.) c. könyvünket kiadja a Mouton de Gruyter (Berlin). | This project has aimed to clarify (on the basis of mainly Hungarian data) basic issues concerning the category "adverb", the function "adverbial", and the grammar of adverbial modification. We have argued for the PP analysis of adverbials, and have claimed that they enter the derivation via left- and right-adjunction. Their merge-in position is determined by the interplay of syntactic, semantic, and prosodic factors. The semantically motivated constraints discussed also include a type restriction affecting adverbials semantically incorporated into the verbal predicate, an obligatory focus position for scalar adverbs representing negative values of bidirectional scales, cooccurrence restrictions between verbs and adverbials involving incompatible subevents, etc. The order and interpretation of adverbials in the postverbal domain is shown to be affected by such phonologically motivated constraints as the Law of Growing Constituents, and by intonation-phrase restructuring. The shape of the light-headed chain arising in the course of locative PP incorporation is determined by morpho-phonological requirements. The types of adverbs and adverbials analyzed include locatives, temporals, comitatives, epistemic adverbs, adverbs of degree, manner, counting, and frequency, quantificational adverbs, and adverbial participles. We have published about 60 studies; our book Adverbs and Adverbial Adjuncts at the Interfaces (pp. 489) is published in the series Interface Explorations of Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin

Cyclic phonology–syntax-interaction : movement to first position in German

This paper investigates the nature of the attraction of XPs to clauseinitial position in German (and other languages). It argues that there are two different types of preposing. First, an XP can move when it is attracted by an EPP-like feature of Comp. Comp can, however, also attract elements that bear the formal marker of some semantic or pragmatic (information theoretic) function. This second type of movement is driven by the attraction of a formal property of the moved element. It has often been misanalysed as “operator” movement in the past

Sentential Word Order and the Syntax of Question Particles

Polar question particles in languages with VO word order pose a problem for the otherwise robust Final-Over-Final Constraint, which rules out a head-final phrase immediately dominating a head-initial phrase (Holmberg 2000). This paper offers a description of these particles and the constraint, and offers data supporting the hypothesis that these final particles are different from their initial counterparts in a fundamental way

Finiteness and children with specific language impairment: an exploratory study

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are well known for their difficulties in mastering the inflectional paradigms; in the case of learning German they also have problems with the appropriate verb position, in particular with the verb in second position. This paper explores the possibilities of applying a broader concept of finiteness to data from children with SLI in order to put their deficits, or rather their skills, into a wider perspective. The concept, as developed by Klein (1998, 2000), suggests that finiteness is tied to the assertion that a certain state of affairs is valid with regard to some topic time; that is, finiteness relates the propositional content to the topic component. Its realization involves the interaction of various grammatical devices and, possibly, lexical means like temporal adverbs. Furthermore, in the acquisition of finiteness it has been found that scope particles play a major role in both first- and second-language learning. The purpose of this paper is to analyze to what extent three German-learning children with SLI have mastered these grammatical and lexical means and to pinpoint the phase in the development of finiteness they have reached. The data to be examined are mostly narrative and taken from conversations and experiments. It will be shown that each child chooses a different developmental path to come to grips with the interaction of these devices

Clitics in Sasak, eastern Indonesia

This paper is a discussion of the distribution of clitics in Sasak, an Austronesian(Western Malayo-Polynesian) language spoken by approximately two million people on the island of Lombok, eastern Indonesia. It outlines the types of clitics found Sasak and shows that there are interesting interactions between clitic placement and focus constructions that result in the violation of a number of canonical word orders in Sasak. The author argues that these violations can be seen as arising from competition for linear positions within the sentence; this can be accounted for within an optimality-theoretic syntax framework (Bresnan, 2000, Grimshaw, 1999) which describes sentence structures in terms of violable ranked constraints, the interaction of which accounts for observed structures as being the most optimal result of constraint competition

Short answers in Scottish Gaelic and their theoretical implications

This article presents an analysis of a novel short answer strategy in Scottish Gaelic, called the Verb-Answer, which differs from standard fragment answers in allowing us to directly observe some of the clausal structure in which it is embedded. It is shown that the Verb-Answer is identical to the fragment answer in virtually all other respects, demanding a unified analysis, and it is demonstrated that pursuing a unified analysis is problematic for Direct Interpretation approaches to short answers, but straightforward for the Silent Structure approach of Morgan (1973) and Merchant (2004). The extended typology of short answer strategies therefore provides an argument in favour of the latter approach to elliptical phenomena

Questions on transitivity

This handout (it isn’t a paper) presents phenomena and questions, rather than conclusions, related to the concept of transitivity. The idea is to return to these questions at the end of the Workshop to see if we can have a clearer consensus about the best general analysis of phenomena associated with transitivity. Section 2 presents alternative analyses of transitivity and questions about transitivity in three languages I have worked on. Section 3 discusses a few of the different conceptualisations of transitivity that might be relevant to our thinking about the questions related to these languages or that bring up further questions. Section 4 presents some general questions that might be asked of individual languages