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Article: The enclitic -mm in Amharic: reassessment of a multifunctional morpheme (1).(Report)
- Article from:
- Linguistics: an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences
- Article date:
- May 1, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Abstract
In this article we examine the enclitic -mm in Amharic and its claimed functions as topic marker and coordinative conjunction. The enclitic -mm has multiple translations into English, and would thus seem to constitute a multifunctional morpheme. In contrast to previous analyses, we argue that the several interpretations of enclitic -mm in discourse are due to different context-dependent readings of its single function, namely as contrastive focus marker.
1. Introduction
The enclitic -mm in Amharic has been claimed to fulfill several discourse-pragmatic and grammatical functions. On the one hand it is referred to as a marker of topic, ...
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