Monday, February 13, 2012

More on special discourse function constructions in Triqui

Copala Triqui has a lot of constructions that involve discourse-prominent constituents, but I do not have a very good understanding of what they all do and how they differ from each other.  I have recently been looking at the morpheme ro', which seems to be a kind of topic marker.  The constituent marked with ro' often precedes a cleft with me se.


In the first example, we have a sequence of two sentences.  The first tells the addressee (a man named Cornelius) to go find Simon Peter.  (In this context Simon Peter must be new, since the addressee has never met him.)  The second sentence refers to Simon Peter as so' 'he', followed by the ro' topic marker.  So ro' seems to refer to a previously introduced topic, perhaps highlighting it as a continuing topic for the following discourse.


The second example shows another possible use of ro', to contrast members of a set with each other.  So in this passage, the discussion is about two representatives --  "One of them is.... and the other one is ....".   In this context ro'  appears on both contrasted noun phrases.


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