Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

ather THE BIRD that did so” counterpart to the negative contrastive focus is left
unstated and only drawn as an implication from the context. Given the contextual nature
of such an unstated contrast, obviously the first course of investigation is to look in detail
at the contexts in which the construction occurs and confirm that this interpretation of the
construction “fits”—this is the objective of sections 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4, the centerpiece of
the chapter, which correspond to three subsets within the overall class of *XP nam bi-√
constructions: section 4.2 covers examples of the construction that do not involve
compound verbs; section 4.3 deals with the compound verb subset, excluding BNBV inal
predicates; section 4.4 looks at BNBV inal predicates in the *XP nam bi-√ construction.
The use of the “It is not A . . ., but rather B” translational equivalency is, however,
somewhat artificial in that the positive contrast never appears in the context, so, in section
4.5, my hypothesis about of the *XP nam bi-√ construction is refined somewhat on the
basis of Herburger’s work on double negation in Spanish (2000). In the final section of
the chapter, section 4.6, I turn to the opposition between what Kiss (1998) has called
informational and identificational focus and argue that the use of the copula to mark the
focused constituent (whether as the ordinary copular construction *XP-am or the copula
that forms a component of the *XP nam [< *XP nu/na-am] constituent) is limited to
instances of contrastive/identificational focus.
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