{"title":"The syntax and prosody of focus in Northern Amis (Formosan)","authors":"I. Bril, S. Skopeteas","doi":"10.1163/19589514-05201004","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\nThis article outlines the strategies for expressing focus in Northern Amis (Formosan). Three types of focus constructions are examined: cleft constructions, focus markers and emphatic lengthening. Focus by clefting is subject to the well-known nominative-only constraint on extraction and relativization found in Formosan and Philippine type languages (Keenan & Comrie 1977), such that a clefted constituent must be the syntactic pivot of the verb in the relative clause containing the presupposition, and its semantic role is co-indexed by the appropriate voice marker on the verb. The other strategies of focus marking do not involve any syntactic restructuring; the focus markers determine the focus domain by their placement on the right side of the focus, while emphatic lengthening is merely a prosodic device locally marking the focused entity. The prosodic examination of these constructions reveals that narrow focus is signaled by a sharp rise, that is aligned with the onset of the stressed syllable of the focus and is optionally accompanied by postfocal de-accenting. These prosodic properties apply to all focus constructions.","PeriodicalId":90499,"journal":{"name":"Faits de langues","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2021-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Faits de langues","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1163/19589514-05201004","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
This article outlines the strategies for expressing focus in Northern Amis (Formosan). Three types of focus constructions are examined: cleft constructions, focus markers and emphatic lengthening. Focus by clefting is subject to the well-known nominative-only constraint on extraction and relativization found in Formosan and Philippine type languages (Keenan & Comrie 1977), such that a clefted constituent must be the syntactic pivot of the verb in the relative clause containing the presupposition, and its semantic role is co-indexed by the appropriate voice marker on the verb. The other strategies of focus marking do not involve any syntactic restructuring; the focus markers determine the focus domain by their placement on the right side of the focus, while emphatic lengthening is merely a prosodic device locally marking the focused entity. The prosodic examination of these constructions reveals that narrow focus is signaled by a sharp rise, that is aligned with the onset of the stressed syllable of the focus and is optionally accompanied by postfocal de-accenting. These prosodic properties apply to all focus constructions.