Narrative focus strategies in Gur and Kwa

Abstract

The paper considers certain morphosyntactically marked focus constructions in five Ghanaian languages which display special structural features in the out-of-focus part of the sentence compared to the canonical clause. Such a phenomenon is widespread in West African languages, and these non-canonical structures are often labeled "relative" because they seem to be typical for relative clauses. However, while the parallels with relative clauses are never complete in the languages studied, there is a constant structural isomorphism with clauses encoding sequential events in narration. Consequently, it is suggested that these focus constructions should be analyzed as extra-clausal structures in which the non-focal information is presented as a narrative clause.

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