Document
V. Vydrin. Focalization in Bambara, in comparison with Kakabe // N. Sumbatova, I. Kapitonov, M. Khachaturyan, S. Oskolskaya, S. Verhees (eds.). Songs and Trees: Papers in Memory of Sasha Vydrina. St. Petersburg: Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian A
V. Vydrin. Focalization in Bambara, in comparison with Kakabe // N. Sumbatova, I. Kapitonov, M. Khachaturyan, S. Oskolskaya, S. Verhees (eds.). Songs and Trees: Papers in Memory of Sasha Vydrina. St. Petersburg: Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, 2023. P. 285-310.
The series of articles on the focus in Kakabe written by Alexandra Vydrina during the last years of her life can be regarded as a model of analysis for focalization in Mande languages. In this paper, I apply this model to Bambara data; the study is based on the Bambara Reference Corpus. It also takes into account works on Bambara focalization by other authors.This approach has resulted in the discovery of an operator focus opposition in the sphere of the future (the “certain future” with the predicative marker na has inherent operator focus, whereas the “simple future” with the predicative marker bɛ́nà has none).
The rules for focus marker hosting in sentence-focus utterances in Bambara proved to be the same as in Kakabe: the subject has preference over other arguments; less topical NPs have preference over more topical NPs; terms have preference over predicates.
In Kakabe, infinitive constructions, relative, adverbial and conditional subordinate clauses cannot contain the focus marker lè; the semantic focalization of a dependent clause or one of its constituents is marked by lè hosted by the final word of the matrix clause. In Bambara, this rule is not so strict: the focus marker dè can appear in all these types of clauses. However, its occurrences in these contexts are rare. They are much less frequent than one would expect if there were no negative correlation.
The same is true for the cooccurrence of dè in Bambara with weak pronouns: although not utterly impossible, such cooccurrences are much less frequent than expected.