In Place – Out of Place: Focus in Hausa

For a speaker of an accent language it is completely natural to mark grammatical focus consistently on all syntactic categories. In light of this regularity, the linguist’s conclusion that focus must be marked universally is not far-fetched. If the linguist is typologically interested, he will assume that focus is marked at different grammatical levels in different languages. Thus, a language may use syntactic, morphological or prosodic devices to mark a focus, or sometimes even a combination of these. In this article, we argue that this conclusion is not correct. The obligatory focus marking exhibited by accent languages is not a manifestation of a linguistic universal but a specific property of these languages. We present a detailed empirical investigation of the focus strategies in Hausa, an Afro-Asian tonal language, mainly spoken in the north of Nigeria. This language clearly falsifies the universalist position. In Hausa, focus marking is not obligatory and inconsistent. If it occurs, it is not driven by the information-structural category focus directly, but relies on the pragmatic notion of emphasis, which in turn implies focus status.