Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

4
Focus-affected constituents in the *XP nam bi-√ construction
At the end of the last chapter, I argued that one of the characteristic features of *mini-√
prefix verbs is that the introduction of the third person animate possessive pronoun makes
the construction definite and the definiteness of the construction allows it to serve as a
topic. Topics are regularly definite, since they are necessarily presuppositional. But in
this chapter I attempt to isolate a rather different form of presupposition, the
presupposition in a sentence in which a particular constituent is in focus. The focused
constituent in such a construction constitutes the assertion within the clause, whereas the
rest of the sentence is its presupposition (section 4.1 offers a brief review of focus and
presupposition and isolates the basic oppositions within Sumerian through the use of
robust diagnostic situations such as wh-questions, which regularly elicit responses
structured on the basis of informational focus, and examples of explicit contrastive
focus).
This chapter looks at a particular construction of the form *XP nam bi-√ (where XP
stands for a constituent of any phrasal type) and argues that it is to be interpreted as a
negative contrastive focus construction (“it is not THE DOG that ate your cereal, but
rather THE BIRD that did so”). The unusual thing about this construction is the “but
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