Unifying predicate cleft constructions
نویسنده
چکیده
The following properties characterize the contrastive verb focus construction in Vata. Morphology: the clause contains two copies of the verb. The verb in initial position carries special morphology associated with the construction (realized in Vata as a ‘construction’ tone). The verb in the clause looks and acts like any regular V. Order: The contrastively focused verb occurs in clause initial position. Omission of the focused verb yields a regular sentence without focus. Dependency: The dependency between the focused verb and the copy obeys the same locality as manner and reason adjuncts (Koopman 1984, Koopman and Sportiche 1986). A very similar construction involving contrastive focus on V, is found in Nweh, a Grassfield Bantu language spoken in Cameroon (Nkemnji 1995):
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