The focus marker in Kîîtharaka: Syntax and semantics

Abstract

This paper investigates a morpheme central to the clausal syntax of Kîîtharaka (SVO, Bantu, E54, Kenyan). The first sections of the paper offer a careful description of three functions of this morpheme, which marks information structure and cyclic movement. We show that the syntactic and semantic properties of the three functions fall into a neat hierarchy. Rather than treating the different uses of the morpheme as distinct, accidentally homophonous items, we suggest an account that needs to postulate only one morpheme, allowing it to realize different amounts of features in its different uses. Building on ongoing work in morphological theory by Starke (class lectures) and Caha (2007), we make the crucial assumption that the features in the lexical entry of a morpheme are hierarchically structured.