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.

Topics in Koa as a Second Language

My seven-year-old daughter Eleanor seems to be a born linguist -- a phonetician in particular -- and it's been fascinating and heartwarming in a way I definitely never expected to experience as she's gotten increasingly interested in Koa and started making an effort to speak it with me over the past six months.

For some reason bedtime tends to be when Koa drifts into our conversations, and it's impossible to describe the emotions when this little daughter of mine says unprompted -- as she often does now -- Ivo koa, mama. Ni loha se! "Goodnight, mama. I love you!" Recently she started counting our goodnight kisses and hugs: ena, lua, tatu, nei...

Today Eleanor took in the fact that Koa adjectives come after their nouns instead of before, and after a moment of amused delight, seemingly accepted and integrated it as she started to use that syntax effortlessly (anu kuma "hot water"). Last night she struggled for a moment with Koa's distinction between singular and plural "you," but again mastered it seemingly without effort. I've never been in a language class with kids this young before, and though with a lifetime of linguistics background I know about ease of learning at a younger age in theory, I've never seen this myself and it's just astonishing.

What's most salient to me, though, is what I'm learning about my own language's phonology through my daughter's ear. Eleanor has always been unusually perceptive about phonetics both in hearing and production (I remember her at 3 explaining the difference between Spanish and English no in a way that would have fit right in in an undergraduate linguistics class) and in her Koa I've discovered the following so far:

* Koa stops are unaspirated
* /o/ is closer than I might have expected, as she's occasionally confusing it with /u/
* My /l/ apparently sometimes approaches some kind of alveolar flap! This isn't necessarily surprising in theory given that /l/ is Koa's only liquid, but I certainly never did this intentionally.

I'm really hoping Eleanor might be able to help me figure out what's going on with /h/, actually, which I've been noticing some instability with lately. Depending on the day, it seems like one of three scenarios is happening: (1) that the onset of voicing in a /hV/ sequence is delayed potentially throughout the duration of the vowel, to the point that hake "search" can come out sounding like [ḁke] or even [ḁʰke]; or (2) that the onset of voicing occurs early, voicing the onset as in [ɦake]; or (3) sort of a combination of the two, where the /h/ is colored into breathy voice which then spreads through the vowel à la Gujarati: [a̤ke]. I'm very curious to discover what's apparently already occurred in the "natural" development of this language!

Possibly even more thrilling, Eleanor -- who already loves to "invent" fairy and animal languages, speaking them in fluent and phonologically coherent gibberish -- helped me create her first word today! She wanted to say "safety" but I didn't have a "safe" root yet, so she suggested lapa and I entered it into the books then and there. She continues to seem genuinely excited about the opportunity to contribute to the creation of this language, and I'm equally excited to suddenly have such an enthusiastic partner in what has until now been an entirely solo pursuit. I just could never have imagined that my daughter and I might find ourselves here.

Incidentally, "Koa as a Second Language" would seem to translate as le Koa mo Cimi Lúasi (KCL), should there ever be a need to refer to this important subject more efficiently.