The long and short of verb alternations in Mauritian Creole and Bantu languages

Wal, Jenneke van der; Veenstra, Tonjes

doi:10.1515/flin-2015-0003

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 28 publications

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“…Makhuwa is a Bantu language spoken by about 5,8 million people ( 14 ). Here, we concentrate on the Enahara variant, spoken on and around Ilha de Moçambique, as the linguistic underpinnings of its focus system are known in detail ( 15 – 17 ). In Makhuwa, focus can be expressed through verbal inflections.…”

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confidence: 99%

Information structure in Makhuwa: Electrophysiological evidence for a universal processing account

Verdonschot,

van der Wal,

Lewis

et al. 2024

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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There is evidence from both behavior and brain activity that the way information is structured, through the use of focus, can up-regulate processing of focused constituents, likely to give prominence to the relevant aspects of the input. This is hypothesized to be universal, regardless of the different ways in which languages encode focus. In order to test this universalist hypothesis, we need to go beyond the more familiar linguistic strategies for marking focus, such as by means of intonation or specific syntactic structures (e.g., it-clefts). Therefore, in this study, we examine Makhuwa-Enahara, a Bantu language spoken in northern Mozambique, which uniquely marks focus through verbal conjugation. The participants were presented with sentences that consisted of either a semantically anomalous constituent or a semantically nonanomalous constituent. Moreover, focus on this particular constituent could be either present or absent. We observed a consistent pattern: Focused information generated a more negative N400 response than the same information in nonfocus position. This demonstrates that regardless of how focus is marked, its consequence seems to result in an upregulation of processing of information that is in focus.

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confidence: 99%