The workshop is co-organised by the University of Amsterdam and the Humboldt University.
Organizers: Dr. E O. Aboh ACLC, University of Amsterdam, Dr. K. Hartmann, and Prof. Dr. B. Reineke Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, Humboldt University (Berlin).
This forum represents the first meeting on focus constructions in African languages organised in Europe. The traditional literature on certain African language families (e.g., Kwa, Bantu, Gur, Chadic) shows that they tend to mark focus either by an ex-situ or an in-situ strategy. While most analyses of the ex-situ strategy indicate that these languages involve a dedicated focus marker, which sets them apart from Germanic and Romance languages, for instance, not much is known about the in-situ strategy. Until recently, for example, it was commonly assumed that certain African languages, such as, Hausa (Chadic), Gungbe (Kwa), and Ditammari (Gur) mainly manifest ex-situ strategies. However, under the common assumption that focusing typically distinguishes new information from old, the fact that these languages have access to both ex-situ and in-situ strategies in question-answer pairs raises the issue of the status of in-situ focus in these languages. This forum proposes to concentrate on the discourse/pragmatics and syntactic properties of the in-situ versus ex-situ strategies, and their interactions with topicalization.
Similarly, it is commonly assumed that non-tonal languages (e.g., Germanic/Romance) typically use prominent stress assignment mechanisms (sometimes combined with syntactic transformations) for marking focus, while tone languages (e.g., Kwa, Gur, Bantu, Chadic) typically use syntactic transformations (e.g., fronting rules) for the same purpose, the idea being that the presence of tone in these languages somehow diminishes the prominence of intonation (or stress assignment). Granting that these languages also use in-situ strategies, as well as intonation to mark emphasis, the question clearly arises how stress assignment and tone assignment interact in these languages and what properties they manifest at the discourse-syntax interface. This forum will address these issues and raise the question of the role of prosody in information packaging in African languages.
This workshop benefited from the financial support of the following research institutes or foundations:
- NWO (Vidi-Project 276-075-003)
- ACLC
- Humboldt Universität Berlin (Institut fuer deutsche Sprache und
Linguistik)
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB 632 Informationsstruktur
