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Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area
Vol. 44:1 (2021) ► pp.75–112

Focus enclitics in Bodo

| Gauhati University
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.
Keywords: focus enclitics, inclusion, exclusion, contrast, concession, correction, multiple focus
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Terminology and assumptions
  • 3.The focus enclitics
    • 3.1Additive =bɯ & exclusive =lo
    • 3.2Corrective =sɯ & =nɯ
    • 3.3Contrastive topic/corrective =tʰo
  • 4.Multiple focus enclitics
  • 5.Summary
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 11 May 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ltba.19005.bor
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