YUKAGIR FOCUS IN A TYPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Formal and discourse-pragmatic properties of the Yukagir focus system are re-examined on the basis of recently collected data. Its basic nom inal focus construction has arisen as a result of the grammaticalizati on of a cleft-like structure and of the partial integration of a sente nce-level constructional focus into the clause-internal syntax of Yuka gir. It thus shares essential syntactic features with functionally sim ilar constructions found in many other languages and presents some int eresting data for the cross-linguistic investigation of grammaticaliza tion of discourse-sensitive syntactic phenomena. The focus-marking str ategy in Yukagir is shown to be applied independently of any text-indu ced 'status' of the focused constituent. Its function is to present an NP as (a part of) the assertion of the sentence and to separate the a ssertion from the presupposed and background material, in the case of both narrow (contrastive or completive) focus on the NP and of a broad er scope of assertion including the verb, in particular for the encodi ng of so-called thetic sentences.