2008

This paper lays out the foundation for the claim that focus accents are interpreted at the interface levels. As in English (and German and many other languages), focus accents in Bangla influence the prosodic phrasing and the pitch contour of the sentence -matters that are mostly dealt with at the A-P (Articulatory Perceptual) interface (Chomsky 1995). That the focused constituent in Bangla attracts P-phrase breaks has been argued for by Hayes and Lahiri (1991) and will not be taken up in this study. At the C-I (Conceptual Intentional) interface, however, focus accents have effects on the appropriateness of the containing sentences --a matter to be investigated with tools that this paper attempts to provide for.

World Englishes, 2012

This paper studies the Indian English use of clause-final focus particles also and only in sentences such as 'He doesn't listen only' (ICE-IND) in order to see if this use has spread to Singapore, Philippine or Hong Kong English. The data for these Asian varieties was obtained from the International Corpus of English and the British and American varieties were added for point of reference. Although the main focus of this quantitative study is on the syntactic analysis of the data, some semantic aspects are also discussed. The results suggest that the Indian English way of placing focus particles in a clause-final position could be a local innovation which has today spread to Singapore, Philippine and possibly to Hong Kong English. In addition, the data was analysed for all subcategories of ICE, which reveals that the frequencies for this use correlate positively with the level of informality of the speech situation in all four Asian varieties, whereas the results for British English suggest the opposite. Thus, the results indicate that clause-final focus particles have acquired some additional uses, especially in spoken Indian English, and that these features have now spread to other English varieties spoken in Southeast Asia. The paper suggests that the cause for this can be found from the centuries-old role that India has had as a cultural force in the Southeast Asian region.

The paper addresses the leftward movement of adjectives in the Bangla DP. This leads to the proposal that there is a second focus position, below demonstrative and above numeral-classifier, in the Bangla DP. I provide two empirical evidences that support the claim for a second focus phrase: one is exhaustive identification and the other one is nominal ellipsis.

2013

This study investigates the usage of the pragmatic focus particles even and still in Nigerian English (NigE). A comparison of ICE-Nigeria and ICE-GB showed diverging frequencies of both particles across different registers between the two varieties of English and a significantly higher overall usage of even in NigE. Qualitative analyses revealed that even has acquired a wide range of new pragmatic meanings in NigE, such as emphatic, affirmative, particularising and epistemic meanings, and that still can be used to express promises and predictions. It is shown that these usages mirror meanings of the equivalents of even and still in the Nigerian languages Yorùbá and Igbo; their spread across a wide range of speakers in Nigeria attests to the status of even and still as nativised structures rather than learner errors.

Proceedings of the Workshop Clause Typing and the Syntax-to-Discourse Relation in Head-Final Languages, 2019

This paper provides observations and some preliminary generalizations concerning the interaction of certain Bangla clause particles (Modulators) with Zero Copula Constructions. The focus is on those constructions that exhibit hitherto unnoticed clefting properties. Section 2 surveys certain basic facts about Modulators and explores Modul’s interaction with simple examples of ZCCs (Zero Copula Constructions). Section 3 expands the ZCC analysis to explore cleft constructions, and shows that Modul plays a crucial role in certain clefts. Section 4 takes the study of particle-focus interaction beyond the boundaries of the cleft construction and beyond the Modul category. Section 5 examines the properties of interrogative constituents not just in clefts but also in an unusual construction – found in Hindi-Urdu as well – which can be designated as a ‘verb-stressed cleft’ structure. Section 6 summarizes and concludes.

This paper is intended as a contribution to the understanding of the structure of emphatic sentences in general, in particular of those sentences which are now referred to in the English grammatical tradition as cleft and as pseudocleft sentences, as exemplified in (1a) and (1b), respectively.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the notion of what is not a Phase is equally important as the notion of what constitutes a Phase. Since the notion of a Phase is one particular (albeit an emphatic) instance of the notion of constituency, a non-Phase or an incomplete Phase is predicted to be a nonconstituent. This paper looks at a curious geometrical puzzle involving clauses with internal Comps in Bangla (=Bengali) and show that such clauses are incomplete phases. In particular, it is shown that the C and its complement are not merged in sequence, nor can they be spelled out as a Phase during the course of the derivation. The claim that the C and its complement do not form a constituent challenges the familiar notion of constituency by showing that an internal C has a non-linear relation to what has been traditionally considered to be its complement. This challenge is inspired by Kayne's ( ,b, 1999 demonstration that P-Comps do not form constituents with their complements. Although Kayne's algorithm accounts for a set of unresolved problems involving P-Comps in Romance, it has not yet been tested for Cs in general. This algorithm, if followed verbatim, is shown to derive the unmarked order of constituents but fails to derive the puzzling C -internal order in Bangla. Another goal of this paper therefore is to present a revised Kaynean algorithm, which, by way of solving the puzzle, is shown to provide crucial evidence for derivation by Phase , Chomsky 1999. This is a particularly welcome result as it brings two different research strands together.

2017

This paper provides the first analysis of focus particles in Thai. Two types of focus particles are introduced: exclusives and additives (scalar and non-scalar additives). The interpretation of these particles invokes a set of alternatives that is relevant to a given context. All of the focus particles obey the adjacency requirement whereby these particles are always adjacent to the focus elements and no scope ambiguity is observed. However, Thai shows subject/object asymmetry with respect to focus marking in which the subject DP focus is only available through the existential construction. There is also asymmetry between wh-arguments and wh-adjuncts in focus intervention effects in Thai as proposed by Kim (2002, 2006). In wh-arguments, the constructions involve wh-clefts as proposed by Ruangjaroon (2005) while wh-adjuncts do not.

Studies in Language, 2020

Focus and newness are distinct features. The fact that subconstituents of focus can be given or discourse-old has been pointed out in Selkirk (1984) and Lambrecht (1994). Nevertheless, when it comes to Sentence Focus, it is still common to equate Focus with newness, and to treat SF sentences as necessarily all-new. One of the reasons for such bias is that formally or typologically oriented descriptions of SF tend to analyze only intransitive ‘out of the blue’ SF utterances stemming from elicitation. Based on SF utterances in natural speech in Kakabe, a Western Mande language, the present study shows that in natural speech SF utterances are associated with a rich array of discourse strategies. Accordingly, the discourse properties of the referents inside SF are subject to variation and affect the implementation of the focus-marking. The study also shows how the discourse properties of referents define the distribution of the focus marker in Kakabe.