Abstract
Formal and discourse-pragmatic properties of the Yukagir focus system are re-examined on the basis of recently collected data. Its basic nominal focus construction has arisen as a result of the grammaticalization of a cleft-like structure and of the partial integration of a sentence-level constructional focus into the clause-internal syntax of Yukagir. It thus shares essential syntactic features with functionally similar constructions found in many other languages and presents some interesting data for the cross-linguistic investigation of grammaticalization of discourse-sensitive syntactic phenomena. The focus-marking strategy in Yukagir is shown to be applied independently of any text-induced ‘status’ of the focused constituent. Its function is to present an NP as (a part of) the assertion of the sentence and to separate the assertion from the presupposed and background material, in the case of both narrow (contrastive or completive) focus on the NP and of a broader scope of assertion including the verb, in particular for the encoding of so-called thetic sentences.
Published Version
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