Morphological Focus Marking in Standard Colloquial Assamese

Abstract

The current paper investigates how morphologically marked focus is prosodically realised in Standard Colloquial Assamese (SCA), the standard variety of Assamese. It apart from demonstrating the distribution of morphological focus markers (MFMs) in SCA, highlights their relationship with their host, and their intonational behaviour. Further, the MFM marked focus has been compared with the contrastive focus (CF) realisation. We propose in this study that MFM induced focus is phonologically different from CF realisation.