The interaction of focus, aspect, and verbal morphology at the VP-periphery in the Mabia languages of Ghana

• Applicant: Professorin Katharina Hartmann, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 461344558

The aim of the project is to investigate the grammatical expression of the so-called information structure in languages of northern Ghana. The term information structure is understood to mean the formal identification of sentence parts according to various parameters that determine their information content. For example, the languages of Europe differentiate known from unknown or unexpected information in a sentence by marking them with different accents. In the languages of West Africa this is not possible to the same extent due to the fact that they are tonal languages. Therefore, these languages use other, morphological or syntactic strategies to express the distinctions mentioned. The languages of northern Ghana are characterized by an inventory of hitherto hardly explored particles above the predicate, which can have interesting information-structural functions. They interact with other properties that are also assumed in this syntactic domain, such as negation, aspect, evidentiality, or transitivity. In the project, mainly 5 languages from the family of the Mabia languages are to be examined using standardized methods. The distribution of the particles, their function and interpretation in relation to information structure, as well as their syntactic position in the sentence and their interaction with other properties of the predicate are to be investigated in detail. The aim of this research is to test the hypothesis that languages which, due to their prosodic properties, do not allow pragmatically motivated pitch accents, use other grammatical modes to express the information structure assumed to be universal.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Ghana
• Cooperation Partner: Dr. Samuel Alhassan Issah