Focus Fronting in a Language with In Situ Marking: The Case of Mǝ̀dʉ́mbà
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsI should state at the outset that I am not a semanticist, so I will not be able to comment on the fine details of the semantic analysis presented here. I do know a good bit about the Medumba language, though, and I think this paper represents a well-written and comprehensive contribution that enhances our understanding of focus movement in this under-studied language. That Medumba allows for both focus fronting and in-situ focus is of typological and theoretical interest, and the authors provide nice background on the semantics and pragmatics of focus/focus fronting to situate the paper. A broad and creative swath of tests are employed in order to assess semantic and pragmatic contributions of both the focus particle and focus fronting. They argue (convincingly, I believe) that the particle itself carries an exhaustivity inference that need not be attributed to focus fronting. If focus fronting is not related to exhaustivity, as has been argued in prior work by Keupdjio, then the possibility of fronting must be explained by other means. The authors argue that fronting instead serves to trigger an existence presupposition which is not found in non-fronted examples. They furthermore argue for the possible contribution of discourse-pragmatic contributions of fronting.
I really liked the paper overall, but I do have some relatively minor concerns:
1) No mention is given of the dialect of the speakers in the study. Given the extensive dialectal variation that exists for this language, I recommend that the authors be very explicit about where the subjects/judgment-givers are from and their linguistic/dialectal backgrounds. For example, Bazou Medumba differs pretty significantly from Bangangte Medumba, and some of the generalizations made about the dialect under study here might not hold for both dialects. It's also the case that speakers who are French-dominant (as is the case for some speakers residing in larger urban areas) may have different judgments than those residing in village contexts. All of this is particularly concerning with respect to some of the more subtle judgments that were relied upon to draw conclusions about e.g. the exhaustivity inference for the focus marker. Without knowing how similar the linguistic context is to that used for judgments in Keupdjio's work, it seems hasty (and unfair) to conclude that Keupdjio's findings were incorrect.
2) Related to this last point about the subtleness of judgments, I see that the authors have gone to some lengths to elicit corroborating judgments from other speakers in addition to those of the second author. I note that the number of speakers consulted for the different tests/constructions varies widely, ranging from 9 speakers consulted for some of the earlier tests, to five or six speakers for some other judgments, to no additional speakers for the existence presupposition examples at the end of the paper. I realize this is not an experimental paper, but more consistency in the number of speakers polled would inspire more confidence about the overall quality of the judgments for future readers of the paper.
3) I notice none of the examples include marking for downstep, which is both highly common in the language and also potentially important for understanding syntactic-prosodic phrasing which could be implicated in the different focus constructions presented. For completeness and to allow for future research to build on this work, it would be helpful if this could be added in.
4) p. 9: “Secondly, the verbal copy resembles the citation form of the infinitive. Compare 311 (23b) and (24a) above with the infinitival forms in (27) for lùʔù ‘take’ and kʉ̀bə̀ ‘cut’”
--Interesting—it’s not exactly clear to me what ‘citation form’ means here to the authors (and I may be misinterpreting), but I’ve never had a speaker give an infinitive with all low tones (even if that seems to be the best underlying analysis for the tones of verbs like ‘take’ and ‘cut’). Rather, they would cite either lùʔú or nʉ̀ lùʔú / kʉ̀bə́ or nʉ̀ kʉ̀bə́
But these forms also look like the intransitive/phrase final form of the verb, outside of the infinitival context, no? For example:
(1) á ↓kʉ̀bə́ ‘s/he has cut (it)’
(2) á ↓lùʔú ‘s/he has taken it’
So, that particular argument for the verbal copy constituting a non-verbal element seems unsatisfying to me. But the other arguments for aduncthood seem convincing.
Smaller issues:
-p. 17, Line 591: We have also see n – line break in the middle of word ‘seen’
-p. 21, Line 722: “Contrasting with our findings from the previous sub-section, Keupdjio (2020) forwards some putative evidence”
I might change ‘forwards’ to ‘puts forward’ or something like that.
-p. 22, line 776: Mə̀dʉ́mbà’s Bantu Grassfields -> Grassfields Bantu
p. 24, lines 840-841: After all, it is well known that the sentence-initial position is particularly prominent from a communicatvie perspective. (typo in ‘communicative’)
Author Response
We would like to thank the reviewer for the extensive and helpful comments and queries. Here's our reply:
ad 1) We added information on the Medumba speakers' dialectal background in FN11. Most importantly, the second author and Hermann Keupdjio both speak the variety of Bazou Medumba, so the reprted differences in judgments cannot be attributed to dialectal variation. Moreover, the majority of additional speakers consulted grew up in the village in a non-French-dominant environment.
ad 2) We appreciate this point and have consulted with four other speakers on the data points in (60) and (61), which were provided as evidence in favor of an existence presupposition with focus fronting (and clefting).
ad 3) We agree with the author's comment that an indication of downstep would be nice for completeness' sake. However, in the absence of a proper training in prosody and phonetics, the second author feels not confident to add the relevant markings. In the interest of time, and in order to avoid unnecessary mistakes in the prosodic transcription, we have therefore chosen to not include this information. We added a comment to this effect in FN1.
ad 4) The reviewer's worries on this point are justified. We have removed this argument from section 2.4. More generally, we have shortened §2.4 in taking out the speculative syntactic analysis in §2.4.2. We still report the main empirical facts on verb doubling in the hope that these will find attention in the subsequent literature on verb focus in Grassfields Bantu, and also to highlight the parallels between verb-doubling focus and clear instances of a-marked term focus in Medumba.
We have also corrected the minor inaccuracies and mistakes observed by the reviewer.
Once again, we would like to thank the reviewer for their very positive and constructive comments.
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThis is a very interesting contribution to the literature on the left periphery on a crosslinguistic level. This manuscript succeeds in showing that, contrary to previous accounts of the language, [à XP] structures in Mə̀dʉ́mbà express contrast and exhaustivity independently of whether they are moved to the left periphery. This is shown by the application of extensive tests from the literature. The suggestions that I offer below to the authors (As henceforth) are intended to improve the presentation for the reader and to connect this particular syntactic phenomena to linguistic theory, as well as research on similar phenomena crosslinguistically.
1. On p.2, the As mention verbal copy, but do not clarify how the reader may successfully determine which is the original and which is the copy (assuming that this matters to us). This is important because, at this stage of the presentation, the reader does not yet know if Mə̀dʉ́mbà has VO or OV order.
2. On p.4, and the start of section 2, the discussion of the data is confounded with the syntactic analysis (in particular, the proposal that [kʉ̀] appears between T/Asp and V). It will help the reader if the generalizations in the data (with examples) are presented first and then connected to the syntactic analysis.
3. On p. 5, around line 158, the As discuss the proposed distinction between framing and focus. This makes good sense, but it is worth noting that contrasting a temporal adverbial is also oddly redundant since such an adverbial can only be relative to the utterance time, and cannot enter into implied opposition with any other time (e.g. not fourteen years ago). You may want to consider supplying examples for other framing adjuncts to better make this point.
4. On p. 19 (l. 678-679), the mixing of languages is awkward and confusing for the reader. Why not use original Mə̀dʉ́mbà words followed by English gloss?
5. On p. 20 (l. 687-688), please insert a comma where marked [,]: "It tests for the availability of a further deduction[,] the validity of which depends on an exhaustive interpretation of the á-688 marked focus constituent."
6. On p. 22 (l. 769), "A'-bar focus fronting" appears. This is oddly redundant. I suggest "A' focus fronting" or "A-bar focus fronting".
7. On p. 24, ex. (63A3), a line of glosses is missing.
8. On p. 24 (l. 851), you have "Destruel & Velleman (2014) could show that focus". Please delete could.
9. On p. 26 (l. 903-904), you discuss lexical governing of traces, which is terribly outdated. Don't we have a more updated (i.e. Minimalist or Minimalist-ish) story we can tell to gain insight on this argument v. adjunct asymmetry?
10. On p. 26 (l. 916-919), some big (or at least bigger) picture discussion would be appreciated, since it will help the reader understand the contribution of this data and the importance of the empirical tests used. Beyond that, it may be that application of these different tests of exhaustivity to other languages will offer new insight on these meanings, structures, and processes related to the syntax-discourse interface. For example, it has been suggested that apparent optionality in focus fronting in Russian (Titov, 2012) is better analyzed as a disambiguation of focus type between information focus and contrastive focus, in particular. She suggests that the moved constituent makes clear that contrast is intended.
reference
Titov, Elena (2012): “Encoding Focus and Contrast in Russian”. In: Neeleman, Ad/Vermeulen, Reiko (eds.): The Syntax of Topic, Focus, and Contrast. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 119-155.
Author Response
We would like to thak the reviewer for the detailed review of the manuscript. In what follows, we respond to the reviewer's individual points.
ad 1) We would like to observe that the previous version of the manuscript already contained information on the SVOX status of Medumba on the bottom of p.1. Still, we have added some clarifications around the verb doubling example, and we made it clearer what we think is the original V, and what is the copy. All additions and clarifications in red.
ad 2) we have omitted the relevant sentence on negation, as this information is orthogonal to the main objective of the paper - and indeed confusing at this point. We think the rest of the information on Medumba should now be clear.
ad 3) We are not sure what the reviewer has in mind. Of course, it is possible to contrastively focus temporal adjuncts, and we show in the final part of the paper that such contrastive focusing is possible with the clefted focus variant even in Medumba. So, we do not think that there is anything about the inherent semantics of temporal adjuncts that would block contrasdtive focus on them and kept the original example. Examples for other adjunct types can be found in Keupdjio (2020)
ad 4 to 8) We have fixed all the inaccuracies obswerved by the reviewer.
ad 9) We omitted the reference to lexical government, and now merely allude to the difference between argument and adjuncts, however that may be modelled in more modern frameworks.
ad 10) In the conclusion, we added a couple of sentences on a potential typological difference between accent-focusing languages (Russian) and morphologically focus marking languages in their potential to unambiguously and categorically mark contrastive focus.
We would like to thank the reviewer again for their positive and constructive feedback.
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe argumentation is clear and mostly compelling, and the data are interesting. The only part that I find problematic is section 2.4 on verb focus. In particular, the evidence for non-verbal status of the infinitive (29)-(30) only holds for verb forms introduced by the nu-particle, and the extension to bare forms like (25) is unwarranted. The occurrence of the nu particle in some instances of V-doubling (28) is not accounted for.
The serial verb construction exemplified in (35) is not analysed and this weakens the argument. As for the analysis itself, the constraint in (38iv) is an ad hoc stipulation, as is the assumption of partial spellout.
All in all, I think that this section should be omitted: this would not affect the overall structure of the argument, hence I consider this a minor revision.
(The trees in (39) are not legible (branches turned into characters) and (26b) is presumably *.)
I find the hypothesis in (46) really brilliant . On the other hand, the discussion around (47)-(48) suggest that à is an optional marker of contrastiveness, and this should be mentioned already at the beginning of the paper.
Author Response
We would like to thank the reviewer for their constructive comments. In response to the problems raised in connection with §2.4, we have substantially revised this section. We have taken out the examples around the citation forms, and we are now more defensive on the categorial status of the verb copy. We only make the strong claim of a [-V] status for the nu-variant that is obligatory with the exclusive focus marker.
We have also taken out the admittedly speculative syntactic analysis in §2.4.2, but we have chosen to report the empirical data for the benefit of futire research. We have also tried to clarify the argument from verb doubling in SVCs as a counter-argument to an Aboh-style analysis of doubling on which it would be the first instantiation of the verb that is the syntactic copy.
All clarifications and additions are marked in red.
We would like to thank the reviewer once more for their constructive feedback.
