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.
All known languages provide a means for marking what linguists call focus. The focus of a sentence is, roughly speaking, the part which provides new and important information, rather than repeating given information or filling in additional background. Different languages use different means for focus marking: English uses prosody, for instance, while many other languages use word order. The Mayan languages are standardly described as using word order variation to mark focus, with focused constituents moving to a position before the verb. This project considered focus marking in K'ichee', one of the most widely spoken of the modern Mayan languages, and demonstrated that the actual situation is more complicated than was previously recognized. In K'ichee', focused constituents may move to immediately preverbal position; but they may also, under many circumstances, remain in situ. Based on that observation we began to consider the question, "When is focus in situ possible in K'ichee'?" The answer revealed a grammatical pattern that has not been observed in focus-marking systems in other languages. K'ichee' is known to be a morphologically and syntactically ergative language, meaning that for many purposes it does not treat transitive and intransitive subjects in the same way, but treats intransitive subjects like transitive objects. For instance, intransitive subjects and transitive objects control one set of agreement markers on the verb, while transitive subjects control another set. We showed that focus-marking in K'ichee' also follows an ergative pattern. Intransitive subjects and transitive objects can be focused in situ, while transitive subjects cannot be. The typology of focus marking has received a good deal of attention from theoretical linguists in recent years, and the ergative focus-marking pattern we observed in K'ichee' contributes a potentially valuable new data point to this discussion. Previously, several authors had hypothesized that asymmetries in focus marking would always involve a difference between subjects and nonsubjects. The ergative pattern in K'ichee', which draws a different distinction, constitutes a counterexample to these hypotheses.
