Focus particles

The study explores the grammatical means employed for the expression of information structure in standard colloquial Burmese on the basis of a corpus of written and spoken texts. It analyses the morphosyntactic and prosodic devices identified as relevant for its goals, namely the differential subject and object marking, constituent order, particles used to create a range of interpretations related to the notions of topic, focus and contrast, stand-alone sentence nominalisations and prosody.
The study argues for the existence of a grammatical system of informational PACKAGING in Burmese that has no direct linking to information structural categories like topic, focus and contrast. Expressed by various morphosyntactic means, it segregates information into separate informational units (PACKAGES) and establishes structural relations between them. This partition shows a robust correspondence to prosody.
The PACKAGING system is mobilised for creation of diverse information structure-related interpretive effects through its different configurations and interaction with the context. Concepts like topic, focus, contrast and apparent contrast-degrees observed in Burmese are interpretive outcomes of this interaction and have no immediate expression in the language. Furthermore, the usage of PACKAGING is not restricted to information structural effects and the system plays a crucial role in discourse structuring and content management in Burmese.
Analysis of stand-alone nominalised sentences along the lines of a speaker’s subjective channel of communication suggests the resemblance with the function of similar phenomena in many other Tibeto-Burman languages. It proposes PACKAGING motivations for this function and shows how this can be mobilised for information structure-related interpretations.
Hence, the study rejects the view of a direct expression of information structural categories by linguistic means. Instead, similarly to many other linguistic categories, it proposes an indirect interpretive link between a pragmatically-semantically underspecified grammatical system and the derived interpretation.

Исследование посвящено рефлексам одной и той же частицы =OK в языках Поволжья – чувашском (=ax / =ex), луговом марийском (=ak, в некоторых говорах =ok), горномарийском (=ok), татарском (=uk / =ük), башкирском (=uk / =ük) и удмуртском (=ik). Описывается путь ее заимствования в финно-угорские языки Поволжья и контексты употребления в современных языках Поволжья.

This paper compares the expression of information structure in the three indigenous language families of the Caucasus (West Caucasian, Nakh-Daghestanian and Kartvelian) by means of the concepts of focus, contrast, topic and givenness. I concentrated on constituent order and the use of particles, thereby largely ignoring other formal means such as intonation. When comparing all three Caucasian language families we can see a number of parallels in the way information structure is expressed.
First of all, there are obvious (and expectable) similarities in the constituent order at the clause level. All three language families show a clear preference for SOV, but other orders are, in general, possible, whereby Ubykh and Laz are more rigid than the other languages (which might be due to Turkish influence on both languages). The major focus position is preverbal, but postverbal focus is also attested and although focal items are frequently positioned in adjacency to the verb this is not a strict requirement. All three language families allow for verb-initial order for presentational focus in introductory statements of narratives.
By contrast, at the phrasal level we find a sharp difference between West Caucasian with its prenominal and postnominal modifiers as well as nominal complexes on the one hand side and Kartvelian and Nakh-Daghestanian language on the other hand side. Only the latter two families make use of postnominal modifiers for emphasis, contrast or focus, although their syntactic status as belonging to the preceding head noun and forming one NP with it is rather doubtful.
The second major parallel is the existence of cleft-like and pseudo-cleft constructions that normally express constituent focus. Although the exact syntactic nature of these constructions has been investigated only for a handful of languages and their status as genuine cleft constructions is rather doubtful, we can generalize that these constructions have a bipartite structure without necessarily being biclausal and make use of subordinate clause structures that are otherwise found in relative clauses. Cleft-like and pseudo-cleft constructions are commonly found in WH-questions, in particular in West Caucasian and a number of Nakh-Daghestanian languages (e.g. Ingush, Avar, Udi). In general, the extent of use of these constructions varies from family to family, but they seem to be most frequent in West Caucasian because they represent the default strategies for the formation of content questions.
The third similarity concerns the frequent use of enclitics and suffixes for information-structuring purposes, but also dedicated focus particles in some languages. In a great number of languages, modal markers, interrogative markers, additives, scalar-additives, discourse markers, and markers with grammatical meaning (person, tense, negation, etc.) are used as focus-sensitive particles and usually placed after the item they scope over or after the head of the phrase.

Il punto di avvio del mio lavoro di tesi è stato il confronto tra le due particelle negative del greco antico οὐδέ e οὔτε, che possono essere usate in contesti confrontabili, in cui compaiono in coppia con un’altra negazione e assumono il significato di coordinatori negativi. Lo scopo della mia analisi è stato determinare le differenze d’uso tra le due particelle, e stabilire a quali caratteristiche semantiche potessero ricondursi. Per fare questo, ho scelto di analizzare un corpus di testi di Erodoto e di Platone, focalizzandomi quindi sul greco dell’età classica: la prospettiva del mio lavoro infatti è stata fondamentalmente sincronica. Sulla base delle occorrenze analizzate, ho potuto definire οὔτε come essenzialmente correlativa, mentre nel caso di οὐδέ ho individuato tre significati fondamentali, tutti riconducibili alla sua natura di particella focalizzante additiva scalare. Nell’ultima parte del mio lavoro ho analizzato il processo di formazione dell’indefinito οὐδείς, concentrando comunque anche in questo caso la mia attenzione sul ruolo che in esso ha svolto οὐδέ, ruolo che è di fatto sempre legato alla natura scalare della particella. Lo scopo ultimo della mia analisi è stato quello di determinare quale fosse la differenza nella percezione delle due particelle; in altre parole, su quali basi un autore greco (e probabilmente anche un parlante) scegliesse di usare l’una o l’altra.

The diachrony of Ancient Egyptian allows us to study the emergence of a few discourse markers. Two case studies show an evolution that traditional grammaticalization approaches would term counter- directional. They also illustrate the role played by formal analogy together with pragmatic inference in shaping specific outcomes of change. A model for describing the semantics of discourse markers is proposed, which can account for their polysemy in terms of an underspecified lexical core meaning and contextual parameters. Their characteristic function is seen as relating a discourse segment with some point of reference. The variation of the latter, especially its explicit or implicit character, results in different uses that are typical for such markers. The impact of the proposed approach on a grammaticalization analysis of discourse markers is briefly evaluated.

In this paper I examine the multifunctional enclitic =go in the Nakh-Daghestanian language Avar. By means of a semantic map I show that its central function is the expression of emphasis and/or contrast. Other uses are the expression of identity, scalar additivity, reflexivity (including local and long-distance reflexives, emphatic reflexive uses), the marking of indefinite pronouns and adverbs, and the derivation of cardinal numerals and converbs. The paper also advances a hypothesis about the origin of =go and argues that it goes back to the copula -ugo. The use of the copula in cleft constructions gave rise to the emphatic/contrastive function, and all other uses can be viewed as extension of this function.

The goal of this paper is to offer a cross-linguistic analysis of the most commonly occurring additive focus adverbs used in Italian, French and English – namely 'anche', 'aussi' and 'also' – on the basis of a corpus of written texts. The corpus used in this paper consists of comparable online news in Italian, French and English amounting to approximately 750000 words. In line with previous findings, our results show that there are important quantitative and qualitative differences between It. anche, Fr. aussi and E. also. These items differ not only in their overall frequency of use but also in the specific syntactic configurations in which they occur when they associate with the Subject of a canonical sentence. These differences are partly enhanced by the fact that this paper concentrates on a non-prototypical configuration, i. e. on the cases in which the canonical Subject coincides with a new entity while the Predicate is maintained.

This study represents the first typological investigation of additive and scalar additive markers that correspond to Engl. too, also, as well, and even. It is cross-linguistically common for additives to fulfill a wide range of functions including, among others, (scalar) additivity, the marking of concessive clauses, indefinite pronouns, association with contrastive topics, and constituent coordination. Based on data from 42 languages from all over the world this paper proposes a list of functions that are commonly expressed by additives and provides explanations for how and why these functions relate to each other. The distribution of these functions and their connections are then interpreted by means of categorical and distance-based semantic maps.

The article deals with the semantics of the focus particle =ok in Hill Mari. The author argues that the particle introduces two presuppositions: that of exhaustivity and that of givenness of the focal referent. This assumption allows us to describe many uses =ok which at first glance could have seemed heterogeneous.

1. Introduction This paper offers an account of how information structure is expressed in the Nakh-Daghestanian languages. The focus of this paper is on word order and focus particles which can be regarded as the most important means of manipulating the information structure because they are to varying degrees employed in all languages of the family. Other means such as a special cleft-like focus construction (cf. Xaidakov 1986, Kazenin 2002), the opposition between certain verb forms (cf. Sumbatova 2004), the use of so-called 'predicative particles' (Kalinina & Sumbatova 2007), or intonation are either not very prominent or restricted to a subset of the languages. Nakh-Daghestanian languages are located in the eastern part of the Caucasian mountains. Most of the languages are found in Russia, but some speech communities live in Azerbaijan and Georgia. Only the larger languages (e.g. Chechen, Ingush, Avar, Lezgian) are regularly written. The majority of the Nakh-Daghestanian languages are oral languages used as primary means of everyday communication. Much of the data on which this paper is based comes from originally oral texts that have been collected and/or analyzed by the authors and thus lack references. All remaining examples originate from texts that have been published by other researchers. The aim of this paper is to present a typologically oriented study of the expression of topic and focus via word order and the use of particles. We employ the standard information structure-related terms— topic, focus 2 , contrast, pragmatic presupposition and assertion — that are widely accepted in typological and theoretical literature on information structure (cf. Vallduví 1992, Erteschik-Shir 1997, Krifka & Musan 2012 and many other works). Our specific understanding of these terms is following Lambrecht (1994). We show that topics are placed at the edges of clauses, often depending on the activation status of the topical referent. Focus is usually verb-adjacent and can precede or occasionally follow the verb. Focus particles express narrow focus, which precedes the verb. They represent additional means of emphasizing single words within focused phrases. The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we present a description of topic and focus positions and the impact of different words orders on the information structure of clauses. In Section 3 we give an account of the major focus particles. Section 4 analyzes the interaction of focus particles and focus marking by means of word order and Section 5 contains the conclusion.

This paper describes a set of five focus enclitics in Bodo, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Assam, India. The focus enclitics are phonologically bound morphemes which are attached to a phrase-level constituent of a sentence, such as the verb, its arguments, or its adjuncts. They all trigger existential presuppositions and express various kinds of semantic and pragmatic relations between the asserted proposition and presuppositions, such as inclusion, exclusion, contrast, concession, and correction. The description of these relations as well as other more context and construction specific functions encoded by the focus enclitics constitutes the core of this paper. This paper also examines the distribution of the focus enclitics and discusses their associated scope and interpretations. Finally, this paper investigates co-occurrence, co-occurrence restrictions, and interpretations of sequences of the enclitics.

Ever since Schiffrin’s (1987) pioneering work, research on pragmatic/discourse markers have exploded, and recently quite a few contrastive studies have been conducted, be it intralingual (e.g. Blakemore 2002 on but, however, nevertheless; Oh 2000 on actually and in fact) or interlingual (e.g. Lewis 2006 on English on the contrary and French au contraire). Contrastive studies are especially interesting because they shed light on the subtle way discourse is regulated across and within languages by revealing the similarities and differences between seemingly equivalent markers that are oftentimes non-truth-conditional. And this also shall be the case in the current study, which compares and contrasts two what König (1991) calls additive focus particles in Hakka, namely, ia3 and me3, both translatable as “also”. The data is drawn from a natural conversation (22’13’’ in length) in the NCCU Corpus of Spoken Chinese (see Chui & Lai 2009), where 18 tokens of ia3 and 39 tokens of me3 were found.

Blakemore (1987) introduced relevance theory to the study of non-truth-conditional discourse connectives such as English also, and, but, and argued that they impose semantic constraints on relevance, which is achieved by one of the three contextual effects (implication, confirmation, or contradiction) they bring about. For instance, while so creates the contextual effect of implication and facilitates the hearer to understand the proposition it prefaces as a conclusion for its preceding proposition(s), after all gives rise to the contextual effect of confirmation and guides the hearer to understand the proposition it prefaces as evidence for its preceding proposition(s). Following this model, Blass (1990) did an interlingual study on English also, German auch ’also’, and Sissala má ’also’. She found that the three contextual effects alone are not sufficient enough to tease apart the crosslinguistic differences of these particles since they all create the contextual effect of confirmation. Thus she distinguished parallel confirmation, whereby one proposition provides evidence for a contextual implication already derivable from its preceding proposition, from backwards confirmation, whereby one proposition provides evidence for its preceding proposition, and showed that while German auch and Sissala má can be used for backwards confirmation, English also cannot. However, our study illustrates that even the parallel/backwards distinction is not fine-grained enough to account for the functional differences between Hakka ia3 and me3, both of which can be used for parallel and backwards confirmation (e.g. 1~4). So, to fully disentangle the intricacies of the two particles, a hybrid of different approaches are adopted here, including Blakemore’s (1987) contextual effects, Blass’ (1990) notion of a confirmatory role in the processing of information, König’s (1991) typological properties of additive particles, and finally sequentiality in the tradition of conversation analysis.

Structurally, the most frequent position for both ia3 and me3 is TCU-medial (typically between subject and predicate; 14 out of 18 for ia3 and 22 out of 39 me3). However, me3, but never ia3, also occurs at
the TCU-initial and TCU-final position, a feature that would be argued as a sign of higher degree of pragmaticalization, which is further backed up by the multiple functions demonstrated by me3 but
never by ia3, including scalar use , rhetorical negation, and universal quantification (e.g. 5~7). The only function shown by ia3 but not by me3 is interrogative disjunction (e.g. 8), which might originally
arise from the conversational implicature whereby two contradictory propositions in parallel are understood as a case of disjunction since the normal conjuction interpretation would otherwise lead to
contradiction. This conventionalization process is much akin to the “V bu V” question in Mandarin, which also consists of two contradictory propositions (V and not V)."""

This paper describes three clitics in Purepecha, namely, =sï, =k’u and =t’u. It is argued that they are all focus particles, since they highlight a set of alternatives. however, each of these elements has a specific semantics: while =sï is a contrastive focus marker, =k’ u entails exclusion, and =t’u is an additive particle.

Classical Latin displays negative particles, like neque / nec and ne…quidem 'neither, not even', that can express sentential negation while at the same time narrowly focusing on some constituent of the clause. These particles are multifunctional elements that can express various types of focus (additive or scalar) and, in the case of neque / nec, also have a coordinative and a discourse-structuring function. In this work I investigate the complex interplay of semantic and syntactic factors that govern their distribution and interpretation. I single out the structural and meaning-related contextual conditions favoring the additive or the scalar interpretation, and I propose an analysis of the complex internal structure of the particles. I also discuss the diachronic implications of my analysis, in particular with respect to the role played by the Romance continuations of nec.

The goal of the paper is to shed new light on the semantics and pragmatics of cleft sentences by discussing the exhaustive interpretation typically associated with these complex syntactic structures. Based on a fine-grained analysis of the contexts in which “exhaustiveness” can be cancelled as well as reinforced by English also and only and Italian anche and solo, we claim that this meaning component associated with clefts in English and Italian is best accounted for in terms of a conventionalized conversational implicature. Our analysis is based on a corpus of authentic cleft occurrences collected from different written sources.

This paper is focused on the concept of phraseolexical variation, meant as the existence of both lexical and phraseological alternatives to express the same meaning. After this first approach, we delve into the description of the use of the exclusive focus particles solo, solamente, nada más and nada más que by analyzing data extracted from a sociolinguistic corpus of spoken Spanish in the city of Granada (Spain). Our results conclude that there is a higher expressivity associated with the phraseological variants (nada más, nada más que) compared to the lexical ones due to different factors related to its sociolinguistic distribution. On the one hand, there is a social variable: the speakers’ educational level; on the other hand, we distinguish a pragmatic variable: the phraseological variant tendency to develop specific contextual effects.

The paper deals with the morpheme kə̄n (~qān) in Ulch (Tungusic, Khabarovsk Krai). This morpheme has the limitative (restrictive) meaning (‘only’). The morphosyntactic features of kə̄n are quite unusual. In some uses it occupies the slot of derivational suffixes, in some others it behaves rather as a postfix or an enclitic. Similar cases of affix reordering in different languages were described by M. Haspelmath in terms of the “externalization of inflection”. M. Haspelmath proposes for them the diachronic path AINFL+B > B+AINFL motivated by the general semantically based “inflection-outside-derivation principle”. One of Haspelmath’s predictions implied by this principle is that the diachronic process in question is unidirectional, i.e. the reverse change is impossible. The data of Ulch, however, that “postfixal” uses of kə̄n are rather innovative, i. e. the ongoing change kə̄n+INFL > INFL+kə̄n (internalization of inflection?) is attested.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the non-additive adverbial uses of
καί. These tend to be identified as “emphatic” in lexica and studies on particles. Here it is argued that they are proper to a particle of emphatic assertion of identity according to the criteria established by Ekkehard König. In order to carry out the analysis, these uses of καί are compared with similar uses of other additive particles in modern languages. The Ancient Greek data have been drawn from a corpus made up of works by Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, and Polybius.

Comparative tautologies in Russian, of the form X kak X ≈ ‘X as any other X’ or ‘X not much different from what X usually is,’ have been the subject of recent studies, predominantly within constructionist approaches (Cotta Ramusino 2019). In particular, it has been pointed out that in idiomatic uses, the two tokens of X differ in referential status—the second token is interpreted predicatively. The present paper assumes a compositional-semantic approach and reports the results of an experimental study of the available literal interpretations of X kak X through the lens of the presupposition-inducing behaviour of focus particles tol’ko and odin. We find that at least for some speakers and some speech situations, the tautological construction is decomposable into a one-place predicate ‘λx.x is like x’ and its argument, similar to the bound readings of first- and second-person pronouns in various languages; in such cases, difference in referential status is unlikely. In its turn, the availability of a bound reading for expressions from open classes, such as proper names and other NPs / DPs, calls into question the assumed peculiarity of the mechanisms postulated for bound personal pronouns.

The present paper is based on an analysis of Evenki oral stories told from 2005 to 2011. In these stories, several distinctive features can be seen in the use of focus particles, as well as in the grammatical marking  of verbs, such as participles that function as matrix predicates. Changes include a tendency towards amalgamation and fuzziness in their grammatical functions, and a reduction of the set of particles used. The number of contexts in which the focus particles and participles are used is rather broad, so that these devices sometimes occur in the same contexts as already existing grammatical focus devices. These changes are partially caused by the fact that most story-tellers no longer use Evenki in their everyday speech, having shifted to Russian.

This paper discusses the focusing function of the so-called focusing adverbs. Based on Italian
data, drawn mainly from authentic linguistic corpora, I will provide evidence of the fact that,
despite their name, focusing adverbs are not always focusing. They can have a weak, a strong
or an anti-focusing effect. The different focusing effects of these forms will be accounted for
by showing that they are determined modularly by the interplay of prosodic, syntactic and
informational factors.