Marking focus in Chatino

Abstract

This paper presents and analyzes new data from the officially endangered language Chatino. We investigate the behavior of a Chatino preposition, jį?į which is sometimes found preceding direct objects. Its patterning, with respect to when it will and when it will not precede a direct object, has so far eluded characterization. Using both natural discourse and elicited data, we examine and reject hypotheses of jį?į's occurrence based on various properties of the direct object: animacy, specificity, thematic role, 3 → 2 advancement (i.e., the marked direct objects are underlyingly indirect objects). We propose an analysis in which jį?į marks the discourse focus. We argue that the Chatino data support Lambrechts (1994) position that focus is nonidentical with “new information”, and that the Chatino data necessitate an expansion of the definition of focus beyond the propositional level. Our analysis incorporates a disambiguating function of jį?į to separate the subject and object when they are potentially parsed as a single NP.