SOV, prosody and information structuring in Beja
Résumé
Beja (North-Cushitic, Afro-Asiatic) has an (S)OV basic word order, and has hardly any focusing or topicalizing segmental devices. Consequently, prosody plays a major role in information structuring, in particular to distinguish topicality vs syntactic functions of nominals. This presentation will be based on a 3-hour corpus fully annotated and segmented into intonation units, and will be twofold. (i) It will first deal with VO and VS word orders where S and O may function as antitopic or as focus, depending on prosodic cues, namely melodic contours and presence or absence of a unit boundary and/or a pause. (ii) In the second part I will look at the prosodic cues in SOV linear order that help distinguish between syntax and pramatics, in particular topicalization of S and O vs syntactic subject and object.
Domaines
Linguistique
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