Open AccessFocus feature percolation: Evidence from Tundra Nenets and Tundra Yukaghir
Author(s) -
Dejan Matić,
Iriikolaeva
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2014.16
Subject(s) - tundra , focus (optics) , adverbial , feature (linguistics) , head (geology) , linguistics , computer science , artificial intelligence , geology , arctic , paleontology , physics , philosophy , oceanography , optics
Two Siberian languages, Tundra Nenets and Tundra Yukaghir, do notobey strong island constraints in questioning: any sub-constituent of arelative or adverbial clause can be questioned. We argue that this has todo with how focusing works in these languages. The focused sub-constituentremains in situ, but there is abundant morphosyntactic evidence that thefocus feature is passed up to the head of the clause. The result is theformation of a complex focus structure in which both the head and non headdaughter are overtly marked as focus, and they are interpreted as apairwise list such that the focus background is applicable to this list,but not to other alternative lists.