none 10.1075/tsl.91.05jac John Benjamins Publishing Company John Benjamins Publishing Company 1757 67858900 1421555 1421459 202507031738000059 10.1075 2025-07-03T15:37:51Z 2014-03-23T22:39:34Z 5 0167-7373 10.1075/tsl https://benjamins.com/ catalog/tsl Ines Fiedler Humboldt University, Berlin https://ror.org/01hcx6992 Anne Schwarz Humboldt University, Berlin & James Cook University, Cairns A documentation of its diversity across Africa This book analyzes the different patterns found across subsaharan Africa to express information structure. Based on languages from all four African language phyla, it documents the great diversity of linguistic means used to encode information-structural phenomena and is therefore highly relevant for some of the most pertinent questions in modern linguistic theory. The special contribution of this volume is the perspective on a variety of information-structurally related phenomena which go far beyond classical notions such as focus and topic. Detailed investigations are dedicated to so far less discussed focal subcategories, like focus on verbal operators or the thetic-categorical distinction. Finally, the information-structural configuration of unmarked, canonical sentence structures is recognized. The papers provide evidence that the formal means to encode information-structural categories range from means such as morphological markers or syntactic operations, famous in linguistics, to less well-known strategies, such as defocalization rather than focalization. 91 3 24 2010 4 13 2010 9789027206725 9789027288424 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam 10.1075/tsl.91 http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027288424 https://www.jbe-platform.com/deliver/fulltext/9789027288424.pdf https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/tsl.91/html Peggy Jacob Evidence from Tar B’arma Based on new evidence, the paper describes the different strategies that are used to mark focus in Tar B’arma, a Nilo-Saharan language. The paper also addresses the question which factors determine the preference for one or another means to express focus. It explores conditions like the type of the focused phrase c(subject vs. non-subject focus) or the semantic interpretation of focus itself (presentational vs. contrastive focus), which are known to have an impact on the formal realisation of focus cross-linguistically. While the latter condition turns out to have no effect on focus marking in Tar B’arma, question-answer congruence mentioned in the typological literature is established as a factor ­influencing focus marking in an African language for the first time. 3 24 2010 4 13 2010 117 144 10.1075/tsl.91.05jac https://benjamins.com/catalog/tsl.91.05jac https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/tsl.91.05jac/html