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.

The paper presents fi rst results of the documentation of Tuu languages regarding information structure, based on the analysis of coherent texts, partly supplemented by elicitated utterances. Unmarked clauses display a ...

This paper investigates the structural properties of morphosyntactically marked focus constructions, focussing on the often neglected non-focal sentence part in African tone languages. Based on new empirical evidence from ...

This paper deals with the means for expressing the pragmatic category of focus in Yom, which is an Oti-Volta language of the Yom-Nawdem group spoken by about 74,000 people (Gordon 2005, online version) in the department ...

Vortrag Wissenschaftliches Kolloquium zur Verabschiedung von Frau Prof. Brigitte Reineke: Wenngleich Brigitte Reineke vieler Zungen mächtig ist, möchte ich mich im Folgenden der von ihr Zeit ihres Lebens besonders ...

This paper deals with the means for expressing the pragmatic category of focus in Yom, which is an Oti-Volta language of the Yom-Nawdem group spoken by about 74,000 people (Gordon 2005, online version) in the department ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...