Forker, Diana (2013) Person marking and information structure in Nakh-Daghestanian. In: Presentations from the 44th Annual Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society. pp. 1-8. From: ALS 2013: 44th Annual Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society, 1-4 Ocotober 2013, Melbourne, VIC, Australia. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

[Extract] What is the function of person indexing?

- reduplicating 'redundant' information

- reference tracking in discourse

- highlighting the grammatically privileged participant

Characterization of person indexing:

- trigger of the person indexing

- position of person indexing

Person indexing in Nakh-Daghestanian: - Nakh-Daghestanian (or East Caucasian or North-East Caucasian) languages are spoken in Northern part of the Caucasus (Russia, Azerbaijan, Georgia)

- salient grammatical feature: gender/number agreement on verbs, partially on adjectives, adverbs

- person indexing is not very frequent in Nakh-Daghestanian

- overviews: Helmbrecht (1996), Schulze (2007a)

- among the languages that have it are: Dargi, Lak, Tabasaran, Batsbi, Udi, and to a lesser extend Hunzib, Akhvakh and two Avar dialects

- generally viewed as a relatively young category (in contrast to the pervasive and probably older gender/number indexing)

- only one person is indexed (with the exception of Tabasaran)

- indexing is regulated by various hierarchies

- in Dargi, Lak, and Udi (Harris 2002: 44-63) person makers express term focus

- focus (Dik et al. 1981) "what is relatively the most important or salient information in the given setting"

- term focus (or constituent focus or argument focus): whenever the scope of focus is not on the predication as a whole, but on some part of it

- two types of term focus:

- completive (or presentational or information focus): the focus fills a gap in the pragmatic information of the addressee; new information (e.g. answers to WH-questions)

- contrastive (or identificational): a reply to the addressee's contrary belief of information (e.g. correction by replacing, restricting or expanding), characterized by exhaustiveness (i.e. it implies that the predication holds only for the focused element out of a set of elements given in the context) (e.g. cleft constructions, prosodic prominence, focus particles)

Item ID:	31127
Item Type:	Conference Item (Non-Refereed Research Paper)
Related URLs:	Organisation
Date Deposited:	19 Feb 2014 06:25
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