Colloque - Syntactic Cartography and African Languages : Evidence for Low Information Structure – The Case of West-African Languages

Luigi Rizzi

Linguistique générale

Collège de France

Année 2023-2024

Colloque - Syntactic Cartography and African Languages : Evidence for Low Information Structure – The Case of West-African Languages

Colloque organisé par Luigi Rizzi, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire linguistique générale

Avec le soutien de la Fondation du Collège de France.

Katharina Hartmann, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt

Johannes Mursell, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt

Following the seminal work of Rizzi (1997), the left periphery of the clause has received a considerable amount of attention with respect to information-structural marking. It turns out that the marking of categories like topic and focus is not only restricted to fronting the respective elements to the specifiers of dedicated functional projections, but many languages provide further evidence for the existence of these structures, for example by overtly realizing heads of these projections.

Taking this proposal a step further, Belletti (2004) argues for a low focus projection in Italian. Her proposal predicts the existence of overtly realized heads of the low focus phrase, in parallel to the high focus projection. However, neither Italian nor other well-investigated languages show such overt realizations.

In this talk, we discuss this hypothesis, based on evidence from various West-African languages. Starting with Chadic languages, spoken in Northern Nigeria and neighboring countries, we will argue for a clear ex-situ/in-situ asymmetry in focus marking, with the in-situ options being compatible with the assumption of a low focus projection. Turning to Mabia languages, a language family spoken in Northern Ghana and surrounding countries, a similar in-situ/ex-situ asymmetry is pervasive in these languages. In addition, and crucial to Belletti's hypothesis, in-situ focus is obligatorily marked by an in-situ focus marker.

We will discuss these low focus marker in some detail, as it turns out that this marker expresses the low focus head only in a subset of languages, whereas in others, it needs to be analysed as being adjoined to locally focussed constituents.