Morphosyntactic encoding of information structure in Akan

Abstract

This paper investigates the interpretive and formal properties of the so-called focus construction in Akan. It argues that Akan has only one true morphological focus marker, namely na, whereas the marker de(ε) that has been analysed in the linguistic literature on Akan as a focus marker (Boadi 1974; Saah 1988; Boadi 1990; Saah 1994; Marfo and Bodomo 2005) is in fact a marker of contrastive topic. The proposed analysis relies on the idea that the Akan morphological markers na and de(ε) carry out exactly the same interpretive function as the falling and rising prosodic markers, respectively, found in intonation languages. It is shown that a number of controversies associated with Akan information-structural marking can be accounted for by assuming a certain parallelism with intonation languages. It is demonstrated that particular types of information-structural partitioning are cross-linguistically encoded via a marked strategy, with the parametric variation resulting from the difference in the choice of the linguistic tool – syntactic, morphological or prosodic – used to create a marked representation.