کد مقاله | کد نشریه | سال انتشار | مقاله انگلیسی | نسخه تمام متن |
---|---|---|---|---|
935320 | 1475072 | 2013 | 22 صفحه PDF | دانلود رایگان |
• A first description of a fragment of South Marghi (Central Chadic) is given.
• Several Chadic languages are compared with respect to their focus systems.
• A cross-Chadic blocking effect between verum and constituent focus is described.
• The results are compared with German.
This article analyses the grammatical realization of verum in a number of Chadic languages. It shows that the verum operator cannot be expressed in wh-questions, congruent answers, relative clauses or sentences containing a negated constituent. It is argued that this blocking effect follows from a lexical restriction of the verum operator in Chadic languages: it is not able to select an expression that denotes a set of alternatives. This restriction does not hold universally. In German, verum may be expressed in all of the aforementioned cases. The article opts for an analysis of verum as a conversational operator (see Romero and Han, 2004). Based on a number of arguments, it is argued that verum is not a type of focus, at least not in the Chadic languages.
Journal: Lingua - Volume 136, November 2013, Pages 103–124