Information structure marking in Sandawe texts

This article considers data from the Sandawe language (Khoisan, Tanzania) and discusses how information structure is marked in the language. Previous research on Sandawe has mainly been restricted to sentence-level investigations, with discourse being largely ignored. The research presented in this paper is based on a corpus of seven Sandawe texts which provide examples of how two morphemes, the realis pronominal clitic (pc) and the subject focus (sf) marker, are used to mark information structure. In addition to being discourse markers, ­these two morphemes have core grammatical functions, namely, marking the clause type and identifying the subject. Sandawe can thus be cited as a clear example of how languages may exhibit a close relationship between information structure and core grammar.

Published online: 24 March 2010
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.91.01eat