Doctoral Dissertation Research: Focus and focus-sensitivity in Kichee

本研究将调查危地马拉的一种玛雅语言K'ichee的焦点和焦点敏感性。焦点——给予对比或问答成分的特别突出——在不同的语言中可能以不同的方式实现：例如，使用韵律重音，或改变词序。这使得研究人员对音韵学、语法和语用学之间的界面感到好奇，这是一种特别感兴趣的现象。焦点还通过焦点敏感现象与语义/语用界面相关：焦点位置的变化可以影响包含某些表达的句子的蕴涵或预设-焦点敏感表达，包括排他性表达(例如：‘only ’，‘ mere(ly)’)和加性或标量加性粒子（例如‘also’和‘even’）。维勒曼先生将在比弗博士的指导下，在危地马拉高地讲克伊奇语地区的纳瓦尔<e:1>镇进行实地考察，以便更全面地了解克伊奇语地区的焦点标记和焦点敏感性。过去关于玛雅语言中焦点的研究将焦点运动描述为唯一的焦点标记策略。Velleman先生自己的初步现场数据表明这是不正确的：K'ichee也有一个到目前为止尚未描述的集中在原地的战略。至于焦点敏感性，在K'ichee或任何中美洲语言中都没有详细讨论过。在两次实地考察的过程中，他将从母语人士那里引出语义判断；并将收集、转录和分析自发对话、任务相关对话和半自发问答对的录音。对这些数据的分析有助于我们对跨语言语义和语用差异的理解。录音和转录也将增加我们对K‘ichee’语言的文献记录，并将公开存档，以便未来的研究人员和感兴趣的K‘ichee’使用者可以访问它们。

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.