Himalayan Linguistics

The present study is an investigation of the information-structural notion of focus through the morphosyntax of focus structures in Mùwe Ké (Tibeto-Burman, Mugu, Nepal).  The focus structures mainly involve the obligatory marking of actors with the otherwise-optional ergative marker -gane/-gadiː and a preferred immediately preverbal position, both of which are shown to correlate with the notion of focus.  The research and analyses are based on a corpus of field data collected over three years in Nepal, including the Questionnaire on Information Structure (Skopeteas et al. 2006).  The paper is intended as a partner for and precursor to Archer (under review), which questions the notion of focus as a category and subsequently reanalyses the data presented here.