Focus position in SOV ~ SVO-varying languages – evidence from Enets, Nganasan and Dolgan

It is well known that the basic word order pattern of a language is closely intertwined with the syntactic realization of argument focus constituents. SVO languages exhibit a focus position at the sentence’s right periphery, SOV languages exhibit an immediately preverbal focus position. The study at...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Eesti ja soome-ugri keeleteaduse ajakiri. Journal of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics
Main Author: Chris Lasse Däbritz
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: Zenodo 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.12697/jeful.2020.11.2.04
Description
Summary:It is well known that the basic word order pattern of a language is closely intertwined with the syntactic realization of argument focus constituents. SVO languages exhibit a focus position at the sentence’s right periphery, SOV languages exhibit an immediately preverbal focus position. The study at hand examines both the basic word order patterns and the syntactic realization of focus in Enets, Nganasan and Dolgan. The major outcome is that Nganasan and Dolgan are much more flexible with respect to their basic word order pattern and, in consequence, exhibit both an immediately preverbal focus position and a right-peripheral focus position, whilst Enets realizes argument focus constituents almost exclusively immediately preverbally.