Open AccessFormal correlates of focussing in Kimatuumbi
Author(s) -
David Odden
Publication year - 1984
Publication title -
studies in african linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.178
H-Index - 4
eISSN - 2154-428X
pISSN - 0039-3533
DOI - 10.32473/sal.v15i3.107513
Subject(s) - focus (optics) , linguistics , bantu languages , syntax , computer science , sentence , selection (genetic algorithm) , artificial intelligence , filter (signal processing) , natural language processing , philosophy , physics , optics , computer vision
Many African languages have a system of grammatical focusing which pragmatically highlights certain elements of a sentence. Such systems of focus often have significant consequences in the syntax and morphology of languages, in that selection of a particular type of focal morphology prevents syntactic rules from applying (or forces syntactic rules to apply). This paper investigates the focusing system of one Bantu language, Kimatuumbi. It is argued that the optimal account of Kimatuumbi focus is to allow the syntactic rules to apply blindly and to filter out the unacceptable conflicts in focus via a pragmatic filter.