Process and pattern interpretations 155(1) hu:ak-a-qu:s mamu:k
early-TEL^7 -CONDIT.1SG work
‘I would work early’
(2) a:n-u:a-qu:-č hauk umi:qs-ak
only-do.together.with-TEL-CONDIT-INFER eat mother-POSS
’He used to eat alone with his mother’
(3) mu:-a-qu: maayi hi:
four-TEL-CONDIT.3 family there.in.house
’There used to be four families living in this house’
(4) sačica-am-it-iš-a wai:q
unceasingly-CAUS-PAST-IND.3-PL homesick
‘They constantly got homesick’
Swadesh (1936: 84) gives a further example with a locative predicate
(from a dialect with a different indicative paradigm):
(5) hi-ap-’a-’at-ma waič
there-CAUS-TEL-SHIFT-INDIC sleep
’He is allowed to sleep there then’
It is important to realize that although the constituent that is chosen as
predicate in such sentences is somehow focused or emphasized, one should
not assume that we are dealing here with Focus assignment at the prag-
matic-function level of the traditional FG sort (although the etic functions
concerned do of course overlap). The ‘focused’ element is rather what the
speaker in a general way considers to be ‘newsworthy’ in the discourse
context (this reflects the strategy of ‘most newsworthy first’ found in many
North American languages with pragmatically controlled word order – cf.
Mithun 1987). Note that the language does have a separate contrastive fo-
cus construction when focus is on a term, using predicates uħ (for subject)
or u:kwi (for object), as in:^8
(6) a. qaħsa:p uħ John muwac
kill do.it John deer
‘(It was) John (who) killed the deer’
b. qaħsa:p-’a kwatya:t u:kwi qwayac’i:k
kill-TEL Kwatyaat do.it.to wolf
‘Kwatyaat killed the wolf’