Focus in Manado Malay - Grammar, Particles, and Intonation (Paperback)

Manado Malay is the language of the Indonesian city of Manado. This book presents an overview of the grammar of this language, with particular attention to discourse particles and intonation, and studies how these phenomena are used to mark focus. The first part of the book gives a description of the grammar, based on a corpus of spontaneous conversations. It presents the main aspects of the phonology, morphology, and syntax. One chapter is devoted to discourse particles, which are used frequently in this language. Another chapter discusses intonation, a much neglected topic in the study of Indonesian languages. The second part of the book is concerned with information structure. It presents a number of experiments that were run to test the compatibility of various constituent orders and focus structures. Other experiments were carried out to investigate which discourse particles mark focus and to define the position of the sentence accent for a given focus structure.