Intrinsic focus and focus control in two varieties of Hausa

Wolff, H. Ekkehard

doi:10.1075/tsl.64.22wol

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Guided by our previous experience with the analysis, description, and typological comparison of grammatical systems that encode focus in verbal morphology (cf. Wolff 1983Wolff , 2003Wolff , 2006 in press), we start off by the following theoretical and methodological assumptions: 2…”

Section: Theoretical and Methodological Preliminariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Papers on information structure in African languages

Fiedler¹,

Schwarz²

2006

Zaspil

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These proceedings, also online available as No. 46 in the ZAS Papers in Linguistics series under http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/index.html?publications_zaspil have resulted from the International Conference "Focus in African languages" held October 6-8, 2005 at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin. The conference was cooperatively organized by the latter, together with the Collaborative Research Center (Sonderforschungsforschungsbereich) 632, generously funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). It was the first conference bringing together colleagues working on this topic from all over the world in such scale. Even though this volume contains only ten contributions out of the 35 papers presented at the conference, it displays the wide range of approaches, subjects and languages studied in the field of information structure in African languages. The collection thus reflects the synergetic atmosphere of the conference. In the name of all organizers (Laura Downing, Ines Fiedler, Katharina Hartmann, Brigitte Reineke, Anne Schwarz, Sabine Zerbian, Malte Zimmermann) we would like to take this opportunity to thank the participant reviewers and student assistants for their contributions by which the conference became such a fruitful forum for inspiring and seminal studies in this field. Also special thanks for their effort in copy editing to our research assistants Lars Marstaller and Paul Starzmann.

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Section: Theoretical and Methodological Preliminariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Papers on information structure in African languages

Fiedler¹,

Schwarz²

2006

Zaspil

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“…Guided by our previous experience with the analysis, description, and typological comparison of grammatical systems that encode focus in verbal morphology (cf. Wolff 1983Wolff , 2003Wolff , 2006Löhr, in press), we start off by the following theoretical and methodological assumptions: 2…”

Section: Theoretical and Methodological Preliminariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Languages that encode predication focus in their verbal inflexional morphology, therefore, tend to display a subsystem of parallel forms for certain aspectual categories, traditionally referred to as "absolute" vs. "relative" aspect/tense paradigms (for a well-known Chadic language of this type cf. Hausa as discussed in Hyman & Watters [1984] and again in Wolff [2006]). This leads us to distinguish between (i) in-focus forms, and (ii) out-of-focus forms for at least some of the aspectual and temporal categories.…”

Section: Predication Focusmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Löhr, in press), have been subjected to reanalyses of their verbal inflexional systems, following up on the pioneer approach by Hyman & Watters (1984), identifying predication focus (synonymous with Hyman & Watters' "auxiliary focus") as an important non-canonical inflexional category. In particular, the relevance of notions such as "inherent focus" and "focus control" were discussed for several Chadic languages (Wolff 2003(Wolff , 2006, and also the intriguing interface with polarity (Wolff, in press). In the light of this work on the Chadic languages spoken in the Chadic-Saharan contact area of North-Eastern Nigeria, the authors set out to explore the hypothesis of potential typological convergence in Kanuri, which is a Saharan language of Nilosaharan genealogical affiliation, and some Chadic languages, which are of ultimately of Afroasiatic genealogical affiliation, in what can be roughly identified as their geographic contact area to the west of Lake Chad.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Encoding focus in Kanuri verbal morphology: predication focus and the "Kanuri focus shift"

Wolff¹,

Löhr²

2006

Zaspil

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Focus on verbal operators such as aspect or tense ("predication focus", lucidly described by Hyman & Watters (1984) under the label "auxiliary focus") has been noticed to exist in African languages of Afroasiatic and Niger-Congo affiliation, but not so far in Saharan. The Saharan language Kanuri is assumed to have substantially reorganized its TAM system, particularly in the perfective aspect domain (Cyffer [2006] dates major changes between the years 1820 and 1900). The paper discusses, for the first time in Kanuri scholarship, the existence of a neat subsystem of predication focus marking by suffix in the perfective aspect which is made up of a total of six conjugational paradigms that uniformly encode predication focus by suffix {-ò}. Kanuri dialects differ in strategies and scope of focus marking encoded in verb morphology. In the light of data from the Yerwa (Nigeria) and Manga (Niger) dialects the paper discusses some "anomalies" with regard to general focus theory which we account for by describing the "Kanuri Focus Shift" as a diachronic process which is responsible for leftward displacement of scope of focus.

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Focus constructions in Hausa

Hartmann¹

2006

The Architecture of Focus

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This paper investigates focus constructions in Hausa, a Chadic language spoken mainly in the north of Nigeria. It examines the syntax of two strategies of focus marking in this language, the ex situ and the in situ strategy. The former strategy was previously claimed by almost all scholars of Hausa to be the unique means of focus marking available in the language. Recently, however, the latter strategy has been suggested to be an alternative to focus fronting. Due to the observation that ex situ focus is rather infrequent in the language, it is claimed here that in situ focus is probably much more widespread than otherwise assumed in the literature.

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Intrinsic focus and focus control in two varieties of Hausa

Cited by 3 publications

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Papers on information structure in African languages

Papers on information structure in African languages

Encoding focus in Kanuri verbal morphology: predication focus and the "Kanuri focus shift"

Focus constructions in Hausa

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