Inner Focus Construction
The first type of focus construction is the inner focus construction. An object is made the focus of a phrase by placing it before the verb with the optional insertion of ဝီရ (‘iel) placed before it. Any overt case marking is dropped, and if the object is accompanied by a postposition, then the postposition is carried over as well. This focus constructions by default has a definite reading; however, if ဝီရ (‘iel) is replaced by ငီမ (niem), then it takes on a non-specific/partitive reading.
[Subj [V [na DO]]] → [Subj [(‘iel) ∅ DOᵢ [(Aux) V [tᵢ]]]]
[Subj [V [zie IO (PostP)]]] → [Subj [(‘iel) ∅ IOᵢ (Post) [(Aux) V [tᵢ]]]]
Subj (‘iel) Foc (Aux) V = definite focus
Subj niem Foc (Aux) V = non-specific/partitive focus
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Example Sentences
ပဧ (ဝီရ) ခာယဧ ရောအ ငာဇီခ၊ ဝီခ ဓဧ။
(Bie [‘iel] kavie lhath naziek, ‘iek tie].)
“I want to drink coffee, not tea.”
ပဧ (ဝီရ) မြဝု ရောအ ငာခတု၊ ဝီခ ဂြာငုစ။
(Bie [‘iel] mlur lhath nakar, ‘iek glarnrs.)
“I want to go home, not to the store.”
ပဧ ငီမ မြဝု ရောအ ငာခတု၊ ငီခ ဂြာငုစ။
(Bie niem mlur lhath nakar, niek glarnrs.)
“I want to go to a house, not to a store.”
ပဧ ငီမ ခာယဧ ရောအ ငာဇီခ၊ ငီခ ဓဧ။
(Bie niem kavie lhath naziek, niek tie.)
“I want to drink some (kind of) coffee, not some tea.”
ပဧ ဝီရ ပုရီငငာဂ ရောအ ငာငိယ ဇီဂ ခာစဥ၊ ဝီခ ဝာငဂြီငငာဂ။
(Bie ‘iel brliennag lhath nanuof zieg karsr, ‘iek angliennag.)
“I want to speak Berlean with you, not English.”
ပဧ ဝီရ ဂဧ ခာစဥ ရောအ ငာငိယ ငတ ပုရီငငာဂ၊ ဝီခ ဂတု ခာစဥ။
(Bie ‘iel gie karsr lhath nanuof brliennag, ‘iek gar karsr.)
“I want to speak Berlean with you, not with him.”
Outer Focus Construction
The second type of focus construction is the outer focus construction. The construction is similar to the inner focus construction except that ဝီရ (‘iel) is inserted after the fronted object and may not be dropped. This construction can only have a definite reading and may not be used with ငီမ (niem).
[Subj [V [na DO]]] → [Subj [∅ DOᵢ ‘iel [(Aux) V [tᵢ]]]]
[Subj [V [zie IO (PostP)]]] → [Subj [∅ IOᵢ (Post) ‘iel [(Aux) V [tᵢ]]]
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Example Sentences
ပဧ ရုပုဒီခ ဝီရ ဂုယာခ ရောအ ငာခတု၊ ဂြာငုစ ဝီရ စုယာခ ရောအ ငာခတု။
(Bie lrbliek ‘iel grvak lhath nakar, glarnrs ‘iel srvak lhath nakar.)
“I want to go to the library today and the store tomorrow.”
ပဧ ခာယဧ ဝီရ ဂုယာခ ရောအ ငာဇီခ၊ ဓဧ ဝီရ စုယာခ ရောအ ငာဇီခ။
(Bie kavie ‘iel grvak lhath naziek, tie ‘iel srvak lhath naziek.)
“I want to drink coffee today and tea tomorrow.”
ပဧ ပုရီငငာဂ ဝီရ ငေီုခ ငိယ ဇီဂ ခာစဥ၊ ဝာငဂြီငငာဂ ဝီရ ပုထ ငိယ။
(Bie brliennag ‘iel nhirk nuof zieg karsr, angliennag ‘iel brbr nuof.)
“I want to speak Berlean with you for now, and later I will speak English.”
ပဧ ဂဧ ခာစဥ ဝီရ ငေီုခ ငိယ ငတ ပုရီငငာဂ၊ ဂတု ခာစဥ ဝီရ ပုထ ငိယ။
(Bie gie karsr ‘iel nhirk nuof na brliennag, gar karsr ‘iel brbr nuof.)
“I want to speak Berlean with you for now, and later I will speak (it) with him.”
Case-Marked Focus Construction
The third type of focus construction involves the fronting of the object to the front of the sentence along with the overt case marking and placing ဝီရ (‘iel) in front. The subject can also be made the focus in this way by simply placing ဝီရ (‘iel) in front of the sentence.
[Subj [V [na DO]]] → [‘iel na DOᵢ [Subj [V [tᵢ]]]]
[Subj [V [zie IO (PostP)]]] → [‘iel zie IOᵢ (PostP) [Subj [V [tᵢ]]]]
[Subj [V …]] → [‘iel Subj [V …]]
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Example Sentences
ဝီရ ဇဧ မြဝု ပဧ ရောအ ငာခတု၊ ဝီခ ဇဧ ဂြာငုစ။
(‘Iel zie mlur bie lhath nakar, ‘iek zie glarnrs.)
“I want to go home, not to the store.”
ဝီရ ပဧ ရောအ ငာခတု၊ ဝီခ ဂတု။
(‘Iel bie lhath nakar, ‘iek gar.)
“It’s me who wants to go, not him.”
ဝီရ ငတ ခာယဧ ပဧ ရောအ ငာဇီခ၊ ဝီခ ငတ ဓဧ။
(‘Iel na kavie bie lhath naziek, ‘iek na tie.)
“I want to drink coffee, not tea.”
ဝီရ ပဧ ရောအ ငာဇီခ ငတ ခာယဧ၊ ဝီခ ဂတု။
(‘Iel bie lhath naziek na kavie, ‘iek gar.)
“It’s me who wants to drink coffee, not him.”
ဝီရ ငတ ပုရီငငာဂ ပဧ ရောအ ငာငိယ ဇီဂ ခာစဥ၊ ဝီခ ငတ ဝာငဂြီငငာဂ။
(‘Iel na brliennag bie lhath nanuof zieg karsr, ‘iek na angliennag.)
“I want to speak Berlean with you, not English.”
ဝီရ ဇီဂ ခာစဥ ပဧ ရောအ ငာငိယ ငတ ပုရီငငာဂ၊ ဝီခ ဇီဂဥ ခာစဥ။
(‘Iel zieg karsr bie lhath nanuof na brliennag, ‘iek zirgr karsr.)
“I want to speak Berlean with you, not with him.”
Topicalization
Topicalization requires the fronting of the noun or phrase to the beginning of the sentence and the dropping of any covert case marking. A pronoun that coincides with the topic is placed in the inner focus position and ဝီရ (‘iel) may optionally be inserted. If the subject is topicalized, then the insertion of ဝီရ (‘iel) is necessary. The topic marker မတ (ma) may optionally be added to the end of the topic.
[Subj [V [na DO]]] → [DOᵢ (ma), [Subj [(‘iel) prnᵢ [V [tᵢ]]]]]
[Subj [V [zie IO (PostP)]]] → [IOᵢ (PostP) (ma), [Subj [(‘iel) prnᵢ [V [tᵢ]]]]]
[Subj [V …]] → [Subjᵢ (ma), [‘iel prnᵢ [V …]]]
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Example Sentences
မြဝု၊ ပဧ ဝီရ ဂုငီဂ ရောအ ငာခတု။
(Mlur, bie ‘iel grnieg lhath nakar.)
“The house, I want to go there.”
မုထ မီပ မတ၊ ဝီရ ဂတု ရောအ ငာခတု ဇဧ မြဝု။
(Mrmr mieb ma, ‘iel gar lhath nakar zie mlur.)
“My mother, she wants to go home.”
ခာယဧ မတ၊ ပဧ ဝီရ ဂတု ရောအ ငာဇီခ။
(Kavie ma, bie ‘iel gar lhath naziek.)
“Coffee, I want to drink that.”
ပြဇငုာဂ မီပ၊ ဝီရ ဂတု ရောအ ငာဇီခ ငတ ခာယဧ။
(Blznarg mieb, ‘iel gar lhath naziek na kavie.)
“My friend, he wants to drink coffee.”
ပုရီငငာဂ၊ ပဧ ဝီရ ဂတု ရောအ ငာငိယ ဇီဂ ခာစဥ။
(Brliennag, bie ‘iel gar lhath nanuof zieg karsr.)
“Berlean, I want to speak it with you.”
ပြဇငုာဂ မီပ မတ၊ ပဧ ဝီရ ဂတု ခာစဥ ရောအ ငာငိယ ငတ ပုရီငငာဂ။
(Blznarg mieb ma, bie ‘iel gar karsr lhath nanuof na brliennag.)
“My friend, I want to speak Berlean with him.”