Verum focus

With the ordinary kind of focus that we've been talking about all these years, we're identifying a constituent that's new or important to the discourse. It's also important, though, to be able to focalize the truth value of an utterance. I have notes in my Koa journal (mainly vaguely worried questions) about this concept going back several years, but only recently started thinking about it an organized way.

Though Describing Morphosyntax termed this "truth value focus," quite a lot of research last month informed me that the best technical term these days is "verum focus," or just "verum" as some people are very passionately willing to argue. I was gearing up for some major construction when I realized that Koa actually already has a built-in way to do this! Let's first look at a pragmatically neutral clause in AFF/NEG/INT forms:

ni te puhu le níkili
1SG ABIL speak NAME English
"I speak English"

ni na te puhu le níkili
1SG NEG ABIL speak NAME English
"I don't speak English"

ai se te puhu le níkili?
QU 2SG ABIL speak NAME English
"Do you speak English?"

The simplest way of focusing on verum is via the particle ia, initially conceived as a firsthand experience or vouched-for evidential but now clearly functioning as as a veridical marker. It shifts the primary purpose of the utterance from the semantics of the constituents to a confirmation by the speaker of the utterance's truth value. As such one would expect that the clause to which it's attached would not contain any new information, since the focus, so to speak, is on verum in the context of a discourse stage with existing players; it would be anomalous if used without that existing context, or would at least cause the listener to infer that there was some existing context of which they were unaware. With our sample clauses from above, then:

ni ia te puhu le níkili
1SG VIR ABIL speak NAME English
"I DO speak English"

ni ia na te puhu le níkili
1SG VIR NEG ABIL speak NAME English
"I DON'T speak English"

ai se ia te puhu le níkili?
QU 2SG VIR ABIL speak NAME English
"DO you speak English?"

A note on accentuation: in AFF and INT contexts the main stress is on the ia above: ni iá te puhu... In NEG contexts, though, the stress in ia na is on na, and in fact they may be written together and accented to make this plain: ni ianá te puhu...

We can also get at this concept periphrastically with eso "real, actual, so" and a dependent clause:

eso ko ni te puhu le níkili
real COMP 1SG ABIL speak NAME English
"it is the case that I speak English"

na eso ko ni te puhu le níkili
NEG real COMP 1SG ABIL speak NAME English
"it is not the case that I speak English"

ai eso ko se te puhu le níkili?
QU real COMP 2SG ABIL speak NAME English
"is it the case that you speak English?"

These are pragmatically neutral again, though, without any particular focus. We can ratchet things up or add focus in a few different ways depending on how heavy-handed we want to get (translations here are kind of stilted -- real idiomatic English would of course use a variety of words and also intonation to get at the meaning: "no, look, I told you, I DO speak English," etc.):

eso sa ko ni te puhu le níkili
real FOC COMP 1SG ABIL speak NAME English
"the thing that's the case is that I speak English"

ia eso ko ni te puhu le níkili
VIR real COMP 1SG ABIL speak NAME English
"it IS the case that I speak English"

ia eso sa ko ni te puhu le níkili
VIR real FOC COMP 1SG ABIL speak NAME English
"the thing that IS the case is that I speak English"

Eso can also be used serially to mean "really/actually X," which introduces an interesting distinction we can make here.

ai se ia loha ni?
QU SG VIR love 1SG
"DO you love me?"

ai se loha ni i eso?
QU 2SG love 1SG VP real
"do you really love me?"

The translations might communicate what's going on to a native English speaker, but context is really critical in explaining the difference. In the first question with ai, the speaker has significant doubt as to whether the proposition is true, probably even predicting a negative answer. There's a sense of "tell me the truth, I need to know, I can take it." In the second sentence with eso, the speaker either thinks or hopes that the proposition is or may be true, and is seeking confirmation or reassurance.

It's interesting that the syntactic structure for verum focus is entirely different from that of constituent focus, but I think that's okay given that Gutzmann et al. claim that verum focus isn't really focus anyway; it seems like many languages have different structures for these kinds of emphasis.