Morphological focus marking in Gùrùntùm (West Chadic)

Abstract

The paper presents an in-depth study of focus marking in Gùrùntùm, a West Chadic language spoken in Bauchi State in Nigeria. Focus in Gùrùntùm is marked morphologically by means of a focus marker a, which typically precedes the focused constituent. Even though the morphological focus-marking system of Gùrùntùm allows for a lot of fine-grained distinctions in information structure (IS), the language is not entirely free of focus ambiguities that are the result of conflicting IS- and syntactic requirements governing the placement of focus markers. We show that morphological focus marking with a applies across different types of focus, such as new-information, contrastive, selective and corrective focus, and that a does not have a second function as a perfective marker, as is assumed in the literature. In contrast, we argue that sentence-final occurrences of a in perfective sentences are markers of sentential focus and have additional functions at the level of discourse structure.