The background marker ná in Barayin

Lovestrand, Joseph

Abstract

This article gives a first account of the background marker ná in Barayin, an East Chadic language spoken in the Guera region of Chad. The article describes the marker’s syntactic distribution and the semantic and pragmatic contexts it occurs in. It commonly occurs following a sentence-initial noun phrase or adverbial, and it also commonly follows a sentence-initial dependent clause such as a conditional clause. The material preceding ná is background information which provides a context for the interpretation of the following proposition, which is the main point of the communication.

Citation

Lovestrand, J. (2018). The background marker ná in Barayin. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, 39(1), 1-39. https://doi.org/10.1515/jall-2018-0001

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 18, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Apr 26, 2018
• Publication Date: Apr 26, 2018
• Deposit Date: May 11, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: May 11, 2020
• Journal: Journal of African Languages and Linguistics
• Print ISSN: 0167-6164
• Electronic ISSN: 1613-3811
• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 39
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 1-39
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jall-2018-0001
• Keywords: information structure; background; Chadic; topic; focus
• Related Public URLs: https://www.degruyter.com/view/journals/jall/39/1/article-p1.xml