The guidelines for Information Structure include instructions for the annotation of Information Status (or ‘givenness’), Topic, and Focus, building upon a basic syntactic annotation of nominal phrases and sentences. A ...

Research on adverbials in sentence-medial position in the North- Ghanaian Gur language Buli suggests that the language offers two divergent slots for adverbials between subject and verb. Special attention is paid to the ...

Literatur ist nach Klaus Weimar "eine profund ehrliche Lüge", oder ihre Eigenart besteht in einem "Rollenspiel beim Schreiben und Lesen". Mit einigen Beispielen wird dieses Verfahren der "paradoxen Bearbeitung" von Texten ...

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 ...

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.

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« ...

Discussion of focus marking in three West African language groups: Gur, Kwa, (West) Chadic. Note: Most data were elicited by ourselves, for some Chadic languages, data from the literature were added.

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.