Formal correlates of focussing in Kimatuumbi

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• focus
• pragmatics
• Kimatuumbi
• syntax