M.A. Theses in Linguisticsat the University of North Dakota (Abstracts)

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Berthelette, John J. 2004
Information Structure in Narrative Texts in Byali (A Gur Language of Benin)

This thesis is an application of Knud Lambrecht’s 1994 work, Information structure and sentence form, to Byali, a Gur language of northwestern Benin (West Africa). In particular, it concerns an analysis of how the different focus structures are marked in Byali, according to Lambrecht’s framework.

Given that this is an application of a theoretical framework in order to describe a language, the thesis has three purposes: (1) to provide an overview of Lambrecht’s framework; (2) to provide an analysis of Byali data using this framework; and (3) to evaluate the suitability of Lambrecht’s framework for analyzing Byali focus structure.

This thesis is available from the University of North Dakota library.