Difference between revisions of "Talking about focus"
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| − | ''We should think about the way we want to structure the discussion of focus marking, wh-questions, and clefts ('''X ref [clause]'''), since they seem to be so tightly tied together. I'm just not sure how to do it right now.''--[[User:Nico|Nico]] 07:54, 30 November 2012 (UTC) |
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| − | :Do we have a distinction between "focus" (non-WH-fronting) and "clefts"? I didn't think there was any difference. I agree that cleft and WH structures are both fronted in the same way, though, and that we should merge discussion of those things under one heading, at the expense of some of the content I might have put in [[Questions]]. I will move things around shortly if there's agreement. [[User:Faytak|Faytak]] 15:50, 30 November 2012 (UTC) |
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| − | :: What I mean is that we've got the kind of focus structure in the examples above, where you get fronting and -u/focus morphology on the verb, and then you've got '''Jegan refu oxe okoor oxe anafna''' 'Jegan is the one the man hit'. Both can be used in wh-question formation: '''an jaw'eeru ñaamel ke?''' 'Who didn't cook the food' vs. '''an refu oxe jaweerna ñaamel ke?''' 'Who is it that didn't cook the food.' So although he translates regular constituent focus as clefts in English, I don't know if we should structurally treat the front + -u forms as clefts. The constructions with refu really do look like clefts to me. Both are used in question formation and you can do the refu cleft thing on regular non-wh constituents, so we should figure out how to integrate that observation here.--[[User:Nico|Nico]] 18:00, 30 November 2012 (UTC) |
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| − | : Whenever possible, try to keep 'constructionally related' data together. So everything that gets the same -u suffix on the verb should go in the same section. So it seems that both wh-questions and these focus constructions (however they are best characterized) should go in this section. The X ref RC constructions Nico mentioned probably would go better in the copular clause section, since they seem to be copular clauses (i.e. pseudoclefts). relative clauses should be their own section as well, whether in noun phrases or sentential embedding. jenks 23:35, 12 December 2012 (UTC) |
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