Focus Constructions in Modern Tamil

International audienceUse of the suffixes '-dāṉ' and '-ē' in Tamil always requires further study for the reason that one cannot always make a distinct and unique description of how they behave in a number of different circumstances. This paper attempts to examine how Tamil speakers construe of these two suffixes and use them both in isolation and in combination in order to mark a distinctively identifiable discourse element of 'focus'. Appropriate syntactic tests are employed not only to illustrate how such pragmatically motivated constructions fit in speech context, and also to identify their significant role in discourse