Morphological focus and its agreement features in Kakabe

Abstract

The paper explores the morphological expression of focus on the example of Focus Particle (FP) in Kakabe. The analysis addresses questions that are rarely if ever investigated with respect to morphological focus: i) how FP is related to the boundaries of a focus constituent, in particular, VP and IP focus; ii) how givenness affects the position of FP; iii) FP with respect to types of CP and CP boundaries. I demonstrate that, even though FP resembles prosodic focus in some respects, its distribution cannot be fitted into a prosodic account of focus, contra Büring 2010 and Féry 2013. More specifically, I propose that Kakabe has a Focus operator located lower than CP. Similarly to Cable’s (2006, 2010) Q-operator that can be involved a bi-partite agreement relationship, Foc operator agrees at a time with C0 above it and with the DP below it. I demonstrate how the pattern of FP distribution follows, in particular, from the conditions on Agree (Chomsky 2000, 2001), such as locality, superiority and activity conditions.

Keywords

• Kakabe language
• focalization
• morphological focus
• focus particle
• givenness