Focus feature percolation: Evidence from Tundra Nenets and Tundra Yukaghir
Two Siberian languages, Tundra Nenets and Tundra Yukaghir, do not obey strong island constraints in questioning: any sub-constituent of a relative or adverbial clause can be questioned. We argue that this has to do with how focusing works in these languages. The focused sub-constituent remains in si...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Conference Object |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2014
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0024-3257-0 http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0024-3259-C |
| Summary: | Two Siberian languages, Tundra Nenets and Tundra Yukaghir, do not obey strong island constraints in questioning: any sub-constituent of a relative or adverbial clause can be questioned. We argue that this has to do with how focusing works in these languages. The focused sub-constituent remains in situ, but there is abundant morphosyntactic evidence that the focus feature is passed up to the head of the clause. The result is the formation of a complex focus structure in which both the head and non head daughter are overtly marked as focus, and they are interpreted as a pairwise list such that the focus background is applicable to this list, but not to other alternative lists |
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