Prosody of focus marking in Ewe

Abstract It has often been claimed that in tone languages such as Ewe, prosodic devices are not exploited in order to mark information-structural categories. The present study therefore investigates, on the basis of an experimental study, whether there is an impact of different focus structures (all-new utterances, in situ object focus, ex situ object focus and subject focus) on the prosodic realization of utterances in this language. The basic prosodic cues we have looked at are F0 variation and duration. From this study we can conclude that focus in Ewe is in fact also expressed prosodically. The prosody affects the constituent in focus, the out-of-focus part of the utterance and the focus particle itself. These effects can however be argued to play a secondary role to morphological marking and ex situ positioning.

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