Focus Marking in Amharic: Types and Coding Devices

Abstract

The term focus, like many of the jargons in the field of linguistics, has a number of uses. Pragmatically, however, it serves to provide a highlight on the relatively salient information in the given sentence. That is, in an utterance, focus, is used to highlight a specific constituent so as to make it noteworthy from the neighboring constituents. This highlight on the specific constituent is applied in order to emphasize on a piece of information inside that constituent, to contrast one piece of information with another, to introduce new information, to reinstate a presupposed information but dropped, to shift the listener’s attention to another information, or topic. These different functions of focus can also be found in Amharic. Like their functions, they are also encoded in various ways. Thus, these different functions of focus and the ways in which they are encoded in Amharic are the core issues that are dealt within this paper.