Focus feature percolation: Evidence from Tundra Nenets and Tundra Yukaghir

Authors

  • Dejan Matić Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen
  • Irina Nikolaeva SOAS, University of London

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21248/hpsg.2014.16

Abstract

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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Published

2014-10-10

How to Cite

Matić, Dejan & Nikolaeva, Irina. 2014. Focus feature percolation: Evidence from Tundra Nenets and Tundra Yukaghir. Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar 299–317. (doi:10.21248/hpsg.2014.16) (https://proceedings.hpsg.xyz/article/view/824) (Accessed March 29, 2024.)