Verbal fronting and focus in Igbo

Abstract

This thesis investigates the expression of focus and the phenomenon of verb fronting in Igbo, a Benue-Congo language spoken in the South-Eastern part of Nigeria. Starting from a broader domain of focus, I examine the relationship that exists between different pragmatic focus types and their realisations, narrowing down to the phenomenon of verb fronting with doubling (VFD), a verb focussing device in Igbo which involves the fronting of a non-finite verbal element at the periphery of a sentence whilst retaining a finite verb clause internally. First, in the general expression of focus in Igbo, I argue that all non-subject focus may be optionally realised ex-situ by fronting and marking the focused item with the morpheme kà. To illustrate this, four pragmatic types of focus are considered: new information focus, corrective focus, selective focus and exhaustive focus. I show that there is no systematic correspondence between any of these focus types and the (morpho)syntactic constructions used in realising them in Igbo. While it is required for a focused subject to be clefted in order to distinguish it from unmarked topic in Igbo, these four focus types may be expressed in-situ or ex-situ. I argue that the use of ex-situ constructions for focus marking in Igbo is a result of pragmatic motivations such as correction, unexpected discourse moves (Hartmann & Zimmermann 2009; Zimmermann 2011) and conversational implicature (Grice 1975). The second part of the thesis examines verb fronting with doubling (VFD) in Igbo. I show that Igbo VFD is used to express all four pragmatic types of focus discussed in this thesis. For exhaustive focus, I argue that while the Igbo VFD may be interpreted exhaustively, this exhaustive inference arises only as a conversational implicature and can be cancelled. The presence of the focus particle sọ̀ọsọ̀/naānị̄ ‘only’ is required to express asserted exhaustivity on any focused item in Igbo. Igbo is similar to Haitian (Larson & Lefebvre 1991) in that only stage-level predicates may undergo VFD in the language. I also show that Igbo VFD is used to express State of Affairs focus (SoA) in line with Güldemann (2009). Syntactically, Igbo VFD does not show syntactic pied-piping of arguments or adverbs. I argue that the fronted item in Igbo VFD is a nominal phrase since it can occur with nominal modifiers and demonstratives, but can neither host TAM affixes nor negation. Building on Manfredi (1993) and Stewart (1998; 2001), I provide empirical evidence that favours an analysis of Igbo VFD as derived by fronting a base-generated event-denoting cognate object. The motivation for fronting an event-denoting cognate object when the verb is under focus, comes from a categorical restriction in Igbo that bars verbs from being formally focus marked. This restriction is also responsible for the focus ambiguity observed between VP-focus and object focus in Igbo. I propose that fronting a cognate object or a direct object in the focussing of a verb or a VP respectively could be classified as an information structure repair strategy in Igbo.