Attention Shift, Information Structure, and Interaction: Atypicality in Non-Verbal Predication in Mano (Mande)

This study, based on naturalistic discourse in Mano and on both morphosyntactic and prosodic characteristics, analyses the Mano constructions formed with the marker lɛ́, including the identifying construction, referent introduction, focus, relativization, and hanging topic. While the identifying construction can be treated as a separate predication, and lɛ́ within it as a predicator, in all the other constructions lɛ́ does not have a predicative function. For Mano lɛ́, we suggest an invariant function instead, that of attention shift. Depending on both the structural and the pragmatic grounds, attention shift can be interpreted as having a predicative or a non-predicative function. We finally suggest that mapping recurrent constructions on interactants’ actions requires no definition of the notion of “clausehood”: NP-based constructions can be deployed for performing a communicatively self-sufficient action of an attention shift. This would present them as “clausal” in a speech-act-based analysis, and non-clausal from the perspective that defines clauses as subject–predicate structures—but this question does not arise in our approach that links syntactic structures to communicative action. The analysis is nested in the approach to polysemy as a “family of constructions” and to information structure as diverse interpretive effects, rather than a closed set of discrete universal categories.