dA: a focus/topic associated clitic in Turkish

This article investigates the contribution of the clitic dA to the interpretation of an utterance and its role in the discourse structure of Turkish. It also attempts to provide a uniform analysis for some of the functions of dA, a clitic generally described as a multi-function particle fulfilling the roles of focalizer, topicalizer, additive and intensifier. The paper presents arguments to the effect that it is the interaction of dA with focus, i.e the affinity between the semantics of focus and that of dA, that has hitherto led to an analysis of dA as a focus particle. Focus introduces a presupposition with a lambda-operator and dA a presupposition with an existential operator. It is suggested that the principle difference between the semantics of focusing and the semantics of dA lies in the distinction between focus evoking a set of alternatives to an utterance and dA asserting the truth of one of these alternatives. The paper further argues against the claim that contrastive and presentational foci are semantically two separate phenomena. Contrastive and presentational foci are shown to be different manifestations of the same phenomenon in Turkish.