LSA 1999 Annual Meeting Los Angeles 1/10/1999 Focus in Manding Moussa Bamba Mark Liberman University of Pennsylvania The Manding languages, spoken by some 10 million people in West Africa, express focus via a particle that is ordered among a string of up to five optional postnominal clitics, between the definite marker and the plural marker, as shown in 1. As suggested in 2, the basic phenomenon is similar on a morpheme-by-morpheme basis across the various Manding languages (of which Ethnologue lists 17). These languages provide a case sought in vain by Ladd (1996 and p.c.), where (some of) the functions of English intonational focus are performed by explicit and ordinary morphological marking. Ladd sought such a case as a point of reference for arguing against what he termed the "radical [Focus to Accent] view," in which "accents are directly signals of focus or discourse salience … part of some universal (and possibly prelinguistic) highlighting function." There are many well-documented cases of discourse configurational languages, "the language type in which primary sentence articulation is motivated by discourse-semantic, rather than theta role or case, considerations" (Kiss 1995). However, previously documented cases of such languages move focused constituents to particular syntactic positions, rather than simply marking focused constituents in situ. Focus-marked constituents in Manding remain where they would otherwise have been, within the quite rigid Manding word order. The Manding focus particle is also (like English intonational focus) not restricted by syntactic islands, as the Mawukakan examples in 3 show: