[Lingtyp] Topic and focus markers with other functions

[Daniel Ross]

Hi Fritz,

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.)

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.

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.

Daniel

On Wed, Jul 31, 2019 at 4:09 PM Frederick J Newmeyer <fjn at uw.edu> wrote:

> Dear Lingtyp,
>
>
>
> I am looking for examples where topic markers or focus markers in some
> language are clearly members of some broad morphosyntactic category.
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
>
> Fritz
>
> Frederick J. Newmeyer
> Professor Emeritus, University of Washington
> Adjunct Professor, U of British Columbia and Simon Fraser U
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