Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

ninda and uzu.zu appear in the same line in (43), the first half of the line, in which ninda
occurs with a negative form of the verb is a simple statement of fact; the second half of
the line, however, draws a contrast with the first half of the line and it is uzu.zu.um in
contrastive focus that bears the copula. In (44), however, œa 2.e “I” under informational
focus is not contrastive and is not followed by the copula. Although both types of focused
phrase appear immediately before the verb, it seems that they can be distinguished on the
basis of the presence or absence of the copula. If my analysis of nam as derived from
*na/nu-am is valid, then the *XP nam bi-√ construction would represent a particular kind
of identificational focus construction, namely what I have previously described as a
negative contrastive focus construction.
Kiss describes two semantic features so as to characterize identificational focus:
± exhaustive and ± contrastive and describes the semantics of identificational focus as
follows (Kiss 1998, 245):
An identificational focus represents a subset of the set of contextually or situationally
given elements for which the predicate phrase can potentially hold; it is identified as
the exhaustive subset of this set for which the predicate phrase actually holds.
The import of this definition is that thetic statements and contrastive focus should be
incompatible: since contrastive focus typically identifies an individual or group of entities
and predicates something of them in contrast to some other entity or entities, it would
seem to call for reference to individuals—so as to draw the contrast—and, consequently,
categorical rather than thetic predication. Since I have not investigated alienable BNBV
predicates or *bi-√ prefix verbs that do not form compound verbs, I can do little more
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