Ines Fiedler

Out-of-focus encoding in Gur and Kwa

This paper investigates the structural properties of morphosyntactically marked focus constructions, focussing on the often neglected non-focal sentence part in African tone languages. Based on new empirical evidence from five Gur and Kwa languages, we claim that these focus expressions have to be analysed as biclausal constructions even though they do not represent clefts containing restrictive relative clauses. First, we relativize the partly overgeneralized assumptions about structural correspondences between the out-of-focus part and relative clauses, and second, we show that our data do in fact support the hypothesis of a clause coordinating pattern as present in clause sequences in narration. It is argued that we deal with a non-accidental, systematic feature and that grammaticalization may conceal such basic narrative structures.

Focus expressions in Yom

This paper deals with the means for expressing the pragmatic category of focus in Yom, which is an OtiVolta language of the Yom-Nawdem group spoken by about 74,000 people (Gordon 2005, online version) in the department of Donga in Northern Benin. The study is based on results of my field research carried out in March/April 2005 in Djougou (Benin) 1 , within the framework of the project “Focus in Gur and Kwa languages” 2 . Main aim of this fieldwork was to study the expression of focus in Yom. Regarding the basic grammatical structure of the language, I mainly rely on various publications by Beacham (1969, 1991, and 1997). The data I present here were explored using different methods developed within the SFB 632, especially by project D2 “Typology of Information Structure” (cf. Skopeteas et al., to appear): the major part of the data was elicited with the help of a focus translation task which collects data concerning different focus types (following Dik 1997) by translating sentence

Prosody of focus marking in Ewe

Abstract It has often been claimed that in tone languages such as Ewe, prosodic devices are not exploited in order to mark information-structural categories. The present study therefore investigates, on the basis of an experimental study, whether there is an impact of different focus structures (all-new utterances, in situ object focus, ex situ object focus and subject focus) on the prosodic realization of utterances in this language. The basic prosodic cues we have looked at are F0 variation and duration. From this study we can conclude that focus in Ewe is in fact also expressed prosodically. The prosody affects the constituent in focus, the out-of-focus part of the utterance and the focus particle itself. These effects can however be argued to play a secondary role to morphological marking and ex situ positioning.

Focus Expressions in Foodo

This paper aims at presenting different ways of expressing focus in Foodo, a Guang language. We can differentiate between marked and unmarked focus strategies. The marked focus expressions are first syntactically characterized: the focused constituent is in sentence-initial position and is second always marked obligatorily by a focus mar