26 search hits
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Focus markers that link topic and comment
(2009)
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Anne Schwarz
- This talk deals with the interdependence between the pragmatic categories topic and focus as displayed by certain alleged focus marking particles of some West African languages.
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What is it about? The topic in some Ghanaian Gur grammars
(2008)
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Anne Schwarz
- This talk deals with the pragmatic notion topic and its encoding in Buli and some related Ghanaian Gur languages and reveals that it is responsible for several intricate phenomena in the grammar of these languages.
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To be or not to be? About the copula system in Buli (Gur)
(2008)
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Anne Schwarz
- This talk concerns the copula system in Buli, a Ghanaian language which has also been attested in Bahia (Rodrigues 1935, Zwernemann 1968). Special focus will be put on the categorization of two copula-reminiscent elements for which I will propose a discoursepragmatic analysis.
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Focus in Gur and Kwa
(2006)
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Ines Fiedler
Brigitte Reineke
Anne Schwarz
- The project investigates focus phenomena in the two genetically relatedWest African Gur and Kwa language groups of the Niger-Congo phylum. Most of its members are tone languages, they are similar with respect to word order typology (all are SVO languages), but of divergent morphological type (agglutinating Gur versus isolating Kwa).
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Discourse structure and information packaging in cross-linguistic perspective
(2006)
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Anne Schwarz
Svetlana Petrova
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Tonal focus reflections in Buli and some Gur relatives
(2009)
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Anne Schwarz
- Buli is an Oti-Volta tone language spoken in Northern Ghana. This paper outlines the basic features of its tonal system and explores whether and in which way pitch respectively phonemic tone is approached as a means to indicate the pragmatic category of focus. Pursued are cases with focus-related surface tone changes as well as cases where pitch could help to disambiguate between broad and narrow foci. It is argued that focus is not consistently encoded by pitch or tone. Parallel findings for the closely related languages Kopen o (phonetic symbol)nni and Dagbani suggest that the apparent lack of significant prosodic focus signals in Buli might pertain to a larger group of tonal languages of the Gur family.
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How many focus markers are there in Konkomba?
(2009)
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Anne Schwarz
- This article discusses the divergent status of the two particles lé and lá in the grammar of Konkomba, a Gur language (Niger-Congo) of the Gurma subgroup. While previous studies claim that both particles are focus markers, this author argues that only the particle lá should be analyzed as a pure pragmatic device. Distributional studies suggest that the use of particle lé, on the other hand, is only required under specific focus conditions, and primarily represents a syntactic device.
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Informationsstruktur : die sprachlichen Mittel der Gliederung von Äußerung, Satz und Text
(2008)
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Ines Fiedler
Anne Schwarz
Manfred Krifka
- Welchen Bedingungen unterliegt menschliche Kommunikation? Welche sprachlichen Mittel verwendet ein Sprecher um sicherzustellen, dass sein Zuhörer tatsächlich das versteht, was er kommunizieren möchte? Wie also »verpacken« wir wichtige und weniger wichtige Informationen im alltäglichen Diskurs? Diesen und anderen Fragen geht der SFB 632 »Informationsstruktur«, ein gemeinsames Forschungsunternehmen von Linguisten verschiedener Teildisziplinen der Universität Potsdam und der Humboldt-Universität, nach.
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Preverbal negative markers in Buli
(1999)
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Anne Schwarz
- This article deals with some aspects of negation in Buli, a Gur language spoken by the Bulsa people in Northern Ghana.
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Low tone spreading in Buli
(2003)
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Anne Schwarz
- In Buli, tone indicates lexical information as well as grammatical information. The changing of tone patterns regularly observed on lexemes is covered best by an autosegmental approach with autonomous tonal and segmental tiers. It reveals considerable deviations between underlying and surfacing tones at several morpho- yntactic points. Realization of tone is sometimes oppressed or delayed. Cause for such disturbances is in all cases a low tone which spreads to the right and affects following high tones with different results. The aim of this paper is to show how L spreading acts and how it is integrated in the system of tonal contrast.
