Verum blocking effects in Chadic languages

•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.