Focus marking in Ìkálẹ̀ and the Final-Over-Final Condition
Daniel Aremu
January 2025 

This paper investigates ex-situ focalization in Ìkálẹ̀, a Yorùbá dialect of Nigeria, which appears to violate the Final-Over-Final Condition (FOFC) due to its clause-final morphological focus marking. Starting with a description of focus realization in the language, I present data showing that the ex-situ focus construction in Ìkálẹ̀ poses a challenge to characterizing the FOFC's domain based on extended projections. I show that Ìkálẹ̀ marks ex-situ focus sentence-finally, and that the sentence-final focus marker projects a FocP, which dominates a left-headed TP. I argue that such a FOFC-violating structure cannot be accounted for based on the extended projections' characterization of FOFC. It is best analyzed using the phase-based approach to FOFC's domain (à la Richards 2016, Erlewine 2017). I further propose that the analysis may be extended to two other Benue-Congo languages (Igede and Nupe) and two other dialects of Yorùbá (Oǹdó and Òkìtìpupa) that morphologically mark ex-situ focus sentence-finally.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008724 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Submitted
keywords:	ex-situ focus, fofc, phases, spell-out, head-finality, extended projections, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [January 2025]
Downloaded:	287 times

 

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