<div dir="ltr"><div>Hi Fritz,</div><div><br></div><div>I'm not sure this is quite what you're looking for, but something that has stood out to me in my cross-linguistic survey work on coordination is that coordinators (often noun coordinators, but if they differ sometimes clause coordination instead) can mark focus/topic in a number of unrelated languages around the world, including some trends in certain regions (Salishan, West Africa, etc.). This is something I plan to work on in the future, so I don't yet have anything substantial prepared about it, but I know it's fairly common but underdescribed. I'm also not sure about how much variation there is within these markers, e.g., between functions like "topic" or "focus" and so forth, just that similar sorts of important elements at the front of sentences are often offset by elements homophonous to conjunctions. (Of course a whole different question is how we can be sure these are "really" conjunctions in the first place, aside from the fact that they function that way; some have additional functions too, although I think this pairing is fairly common.)</div><div><br></div><div>But what you're asking for seems to imply something like distributional criteria, e.g., verb suffixes on the negation element in Estonian showing that it is an auxiliary verb. In the case of conjunctions, but I would assume in general most focus markers too, there is of course no morphological clue about word class. It's harder to use syntactic distribution here, although if you accept English "not" as an adverb then I don't see why you wouldn't also accept many of these focus markers as conjunctions. If, on the other hand, you are particularly searching for mophological evidence, then I'd start just by collecting any attested examples of inflecting focus markers; my impression is that would be very rare, although I haven't investigated that topic specifically. Other members of this list can probably suggest known examples.<br></div><div><br></div><div>If the relationship between coordinators and focus markers interests you I can find some example references for you, but this is usually talked about in passing (or something I've just noticed myself due to homophony), and I don't have any sort of representative results collected, just some notes and plans to work on it later.</div><div><br></div><div>Daniel<br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Jul 31, 2019 at 4:09 PM Frederick J Newmeyer <<a href="mailto:fjn@uw.edu">fjn@uw.edu</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-family:"Palatino",serif"><font size="4"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">
</span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-family:"Palatino",serif"><font size="4"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Dear Lingtyp,<span></span></span></font></p><font size="4">
</font><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-family:"Palatino",serif"><font size="4"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></font></p><font size="4">
</font><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-family:"Palatino",serif"><font size="4"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">I am looking for examples where topic markers or focus
markers in some language are clearly members of some broad morphosyntactic
category.<span></span></span></font></p><font size="4">
</font><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-family:"Palatino",serif"><font size="4"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></font></p><font size="4">
</font><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-family:"Palatino",serif"><font size="4"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Let me give an example involving negatives of the sort of thing
that I am looking for. Negative elements in various languages are often members
of a broader category: in Estonian negative particles are auxiliaries, in
Tongan they are complement-taking verbs, in English they are adverbs, and so
on.<span></span></span></font></p><font size="4">
</font><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-family:"Palatino",serif"><font size="4"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></font></p><font size="4">
</font><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-family:"Palatino",serif"><font size="4"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">So what I am looking for are parallel examples with topic and
focus markers: cases where a reasonable analysis would assign them to some
broader category.<span></span></span></font></p><font size="4">
</font><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-family:"Palatino",serif"><font size="4"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></font></p><font size="4"></font><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-family:"Palatino",serif"><font size="4"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Thanks,<span></span></span></font></p><font size="4">
</font><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-family:"Palatino",serif"><font size="4"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></font></p><font size="4">
</font><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-family:"Palatino",serif"><font size="4"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Fritz<span></span></span></font></p><font size="4">
</font><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail-m_6520404843233452221gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><font size="4"><br>Frederick J. Newmeyer<br>Professor Emeritus, University of Washington<br></font></div><font size="4">Adjunct Professor, U of British Columbia and Simon Fraser U</font><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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