Contrastive focus

The article puts forward a discourse-pragmatic approach to the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. It is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of "contrastive focus", "kontrast" (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or "identificational focus" (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms like introduction of alternatives or exhaustivity. Rather, an adequate analysis must take into account discourse-pragmatic notions like hearer expectation or discourse expectability of the focused content in a given discourse situation. The less expected a given content is judged to be for the hearer, relative to the Common Ground, the more likely a speaker is to mark this content by means of special grammatical devices, giving rise to emphasis

Morphological focus marking in Gùrùntùm (West Chadic)

The paper presents an in-depth study of focus marking in Gùrùntùm, a West Ch adic language spoken in Bauchi Province of Northern Nigeria. Focus in Gùrùntùm is marked morphologically by means of a focus marker a, which typically precedes the focus constituent. Even though the morphological focus-marking system of Gùrùntùm allows for a lot of fine-grained distinctions in information structure (IS) in principle, the language is not entirely free of focus ambiguities that arise as the result of conflicting IS- and syntactic requirements that govern the placement of focus markers. We show that morphological focus marking with a applies across different types of focus, such as newinformation, contrastive, selective and corrective focus, and that a does not have a second function as a perfectivity marker, as is assumed in the literature. In contrast, we show at the end of the paper that a can also function as a foregrounding device at the level of discourse structure

Focus strategies in chadic : the case of tangale revisited

We argue that the standard focus theories reach their limits when confronted with the focus systems of the Chadic languages. The backbone of the standard focus theories consists of two assumptions, both called into question by the languages under consideration. Firstly, it is standardly assumed that focus is generally marked by stress. The Chadic languages, however, exhibit a variety of different devices for focus marking. Secondly, it is assumed that focus is always marked. In Tangale, at least, focus is not marked consistently on all types of constituents. The paper offers two possible solutions to this dilemma

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

Fake tense in Hausa counterfactuals: A novel argument for underspecified EXCL

The paper presents a novel argument from Hausa (Chadic) for the analysis of counterfactual fake tense in terms of a lexically underspecified EXCL-operator (Iatridou 2000). Evidence comes from the facts (i.) that Hausa has no obligatory inflectional tense marking on the verb; and (ii.) that temporal anteriority and counterfactuality in Hausa are both expressed by a left-peripheral operator element with the segmental shape daa, which is then tonally disambiguated to temporal dâa and counterfactual dàa, respectively. The analysis is cast in von Prince's (2019) modified branching-world model of counterfactuals

Pluractional Quantifiers: The occasional-construction in English and German

I investigate a syntactic construction which raises an interesting question for compositionality: An adjective seems to be interpreted outside its containing DP, taking scope over the entire sentence. With Larson (1999), I assume that the adjective incorporates into the DP-determiner, forming a complex quantifier. I present independent evidence in favour of such an analysis. Furthermore, I argue that Larson' s semantic account of D-A-incorporation is in need of revision. I propose an alternative, more empirically adequate analysis which treats D+ A composites as Lasersohnian (1995) pluractional quantifiers

Embedded Questions and Concealed Relative Questions in Hausa and Akan

The central goal of this paper is to instigate cross-linguistic research on the interpretation of embedded interrogatives and concealed relative clauses. The empirical focus is on the West African languages Hausa and Akan, which prominently employ relativized DPs for expressing embedded questions. The paper first discusses the different ways for interpreting and analyzing embedded wh-interrogatives: interpretations vary from strong exhaustive via intermediate and weak exhaustive to non-exhaustive. We will then present data on concealed relative questions in Hausa and Akan, focusing on the issues of how such structures are compositionally interpreted, and how they behave in terms of (non-) exhaustivity. Drawing on existing analyses of concealed and interrogative questions in English, we tentatively propose two formal analyses for concealed relative questions in the two languages discussed

A Compositional Analysis of Anti-Quantifiers as Quantifiers

No abstract

Language and Arithmetic: A Failure to Find Cross Cognitive Domain Semantic Priming Between Exception Phrases and Subtraction or Addition

We examined cross-domain semantic priming effects between arithmetic and language. We paired subtractions with their linguistic equivalent, exception phrases (EPs) with positive quantifiers (e.g., “everybody except John”) while pairing additions with their own linguistic equivalent, EPs with negative quantifiers (e.g., “nobody except John”; Moltmann, 1995). We hypothesized that EPs with positive quantifiers prime subtractions and inhibit additions while EPs with negative quantifiers prime additions and inhibit subtractions. Furthermore, we expected similar priming and inhibition effects from arithmetic into semantics. Our design allowed for a bidirectional analysis by using one trial's target as the prime for the next trial. Two experiments failed to show significant priming effects in either direction. Implications and possible shortcomings are explored in the general discussion