Focus Realisation and Association with Focus in Ngamo (West Chadic) (with Mira Grubic)
In this talk, I discuss the realisation of focus in Ngamo, which like many (West) African languages does not require the explicit marking of focus on non-subjects in terms of absolute prominence (pitch, movement, markers). I discuss various analyses of the realisation of focus in Ngamo and show that only two are compatible with the observable facts: (i) Analysis I assumes that focus in Ngamo is consistently marked on all constituents, but not in terms of absolute prominence, but in terms of alignment with major prosodic phrases(Féry , submitted); (ii) Analysis II assumes an asymmetry in the focus marking system of Ngamo in that only subject foci must be marked. In the final part of the talk, I show that the association behaviour of focus-particles (exclusive 'only' vs additive 'also') provides us with evidence in favour of analysis I.
