Focus Fronting in a Language with In Situ Marking: The Case of Mǝ̀dʉ́mbà

Author:

Zimmermann Malte1ORCID,Kouankem Constantine2ORCID

Affiliation:

1. Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam, 14476 Potsdam, Germany

2. Department of Bilingual Letters, University of Bertoua, Bertoua P.O. Box 416, Cameroon

Abstract

This paper discusses the structural realisation of contrastive focus in the Grassfields Bantu language Bamileke Mǝ̀dʉ́mbà, yet another language with grammatically optional focus fronting. We show that the realisation of contrastive focus in Mǝ̀dʉ́mbà is by default marked in situ with the morphological focus marker á. We further show that á introduces an additional, not-at-issue exhaustivity inference as part of its lexical meaning. Taken together, this means that two often-discussed interpretive triggers of grammatically optional focus fronting, namely, contrastivity and exhaustivity, are not responsible for triggering Mǝ̀dʉ́mbà’s focus left-dislocation. Rather, the main semantic contribution of focus fronting consists in triggering an existence presupposition, a discourse-semantic effect well known from other focus–background bipartitions, possibly in combination with other, softer discourse-semantic effects, such as the special emphasis required in cases of discourse unexpectedness.

Funder

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

Publisher

MDPI AG

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