The article analyzes the expression of understood objects in Somali. There is no object pronoun o... more The article analyzes the expression of understood objects in Somali. There is no object pronoun of 3rd person in Somali; this gap is usually interpreted as a "full Ø", which saturates the valency of a transitive verb and forces a reading with an anaphoric object. The article shows that this is empirically incorrect: in certain configurations, Somali transitive verbs admit either an anaphoric or a generic reading even in the absence of either an object NP or a non-null pronoun. In order to ensure a generic-object reading, Somali has further recourse to noun incorporation. The article explores the productivity of this strategy as a detopicalizing, backgrounding mechanism and argues that the overall generality of the anaphoric reading is the result of the obligatoriness of focus marking.
The article analyzes the expression of understood objects in Somali. There is no object pronoun o... more The article analyzes the expression of understood objects in Somali. There is no object pronoun of 3rd person in Somali; this gap is usually interpreted as a "full Ø", which saturates the valency of a transitive verb and forces a reading with an anaphoric object. The article shows that this is empirically incorrect: in certain configurations, Somali transitive verbs admit either an anaphoric or a generic reading even in the absence of either an object NP or a non-null pronoun. In order to ensure a generic-object reading, Somali has further recourse to noun incorporation. The article explores the productivity of this strategy as a detopicalizing, backgrounding mechanism and argues that the overall generality of the anaphoric reading is the result of the obligatoriness of focus marking.
N° 1 (2014): Imagining Cultures of Cooperation - Proceedings of the III CUCS Congress, Turin 19-21 September 2013
The paper summarizes the language and educational policy of the Republic of South Sudan against t... more The paper summarizes the language and educational policy of the Republic of South Sudan against the backdrop of a sociolinguistic survey conducted in Juba, South Sudan, in the months of July-August 2013, and aiming at a better understanding of the role, uses and beliefs surrounding the use of Juba Arabic, an Arabic-based pidgincreole widely used in Juba and in a wide part of the newly independent country. The results highlight the fact that, although the government of the newly independent country does not recognize the very existence of Juba Arabic, this is the real lingua franca and the most widely spoken language. In a parallel way, although Arabic, the former official language, is not granted any special role and status, it still acts as the de facto “high variety.
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Papers by Mauro Tosco