Doctoral Dissertation Research: Focus and focus-sensitivity in Kichee

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

This study will investigate focus and focus-senstivity in K'ichee', a Mayan language of Guatemala. Focus -- the special prominence given to contrastive or question-answering constituents -- may be realized in different ways in different languages: for instance, using prosodic emphasis, or changes in word order. This has made it a phenomenon of particular interest for researchers curious about the interfaces between phonology, syntax and/or pragmatics. Focus also has relevance to the semantics/pragmatics interface, via the phenomenon of focus sensitivity: changes in focus placement can affect the entailments or presuppositions of a sentence which contains certain expressions focus-sensitive expressions, including exclusive (e.g. 'only,' 'mere(ly)') and additive or scalar- additive particles (e.g 'also' and 'even'). Working under the direction of Dr. Beaver, Mr. Velleman will conduct fieldwork in the town of Nahualá, in the K'ichee'-speaking region of the Guatemalan highlands, in order to arrive at a more complete picture of focus marking and focus-sensitivity in K'ichee'. Past work on focus in Mayan langauges has described focus movement as the sole focus-marking strategy. Mr. Velleman's own preliminary field data shows that this is incorrect: K'ichee' also has a focus-in-situ strategy which has so far gone undescribed. As for focus-sensitivity, it has not been discussed in detail in K'ichee', or indeed in any Mesoamerican language. Over the course of two field trips, he will elicit semantic judgments from native speakers; and will collect, transcribe and analyze recordings of spontaneous conversation, task-related dialogue, and semi-spontaneous question/answer pairs. The analysis of these data will contribute to our understanding of crosslinguistic semantic and pragmatic variation. The recordings and transcriptions will also add to our documentary record of the K'ichee' language, and will be publically archived so that future researchers and interested K'ichee' speakers may access them.