focus morphemes

[Manfred Krifka]

Focus morphemes actually appear to be quite frequent. A case not mentioned
so far is Quechua (cf. e.g. "Focus in Quechua" by Pieter Muysken, in K. E.
Kiss (ed.), Discourse Configurational Languages, Oxford University Press
1995 (the book also contains a treatment of focus morphemes in Somali).
Another case is Navajo, cf. Ellen Schauber, "Focus and presupposition: A
comparison of English Intonation and Navajo Particle Placement", in D.
Napoli, (ed) 1978, Georgetown University Press. An related case is spoken
Korean, where in general case markers are deleted except if the noun is in
focus.

================================================================
 Manfred Krifka, Associate Professor
Dept. of Linguistics, B5100
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712-1196, USA
phone: (o) +1-512-471 1701, (fax) 471 4340, (h) 326 9889
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~krifka/