4.1.4. Emphatic focus
Emphatic focus is used for highlighting a particular item or drawing attention to it. Emphasis may be conveyed by repeating the focused item. The repeated items are usually morphologically simple elements or syntactic heads, for example modals, verbs, tense signs, negative signs, quantifiers, nouns, and wh- elements. The example below shows a repeated modal verb (be_able).
Context: Someone asks if the signer runs.
foc
yes ix1 be_able ix1 run be_able ix1
‘Yes, I can, I can run.’
Emphasis can also be conveyed through the repetition of the emphatic lexical item self or ix_person (LEXICON 3.7.4).
foc
ix1 self pay self
‘I have paid for myself!’
In LIS, emphasis can be conveyed by other strategies as well, such as particular intonation contours, generally based on specific non-manual markers, especially wide eye and brow raise.
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant Agreement No 693349.