Language-specific and universal patterns in narrow focus marking in Romani

Abstract

This paper presents a first sketch of the intonation and rich focus marking devices of Komotini Romani on the basis of an autosegmental-metrical analysis of spontaneous data prosody. Contrary to the “minimality condition” that has been argued to prevail in the choice of focus strategies, Komotini Romani often uses several focus marking devices concurrently. Moreover, Komotini Romani adds stress-shift to the list of focus marking strategies available cross-linguistically.