Presentationals in Kirundi (Bantu JD62). A distinctive type of focus marking

International audience This corpus-based study examines presentational constructions in Kirundi (Bantu JD62) from both formal and functional perspectives. Syntactically, presentationals are just like clefts formally complex biclausal constructions conveying a propositional content that is logically simple (Lambrecht 2001). Nonetheless, both formally and functionally, clefts and presentationals are in near complementary distribution in Kirundi. Morphologically speaking, both types of constructions have distinct morphemes introducing the head clause. After presenting Kirundi's dedicated cleft markers in Lafkioui et al. (2016), we present the different kinds of dedicated presentational markers, i.e. (1) markers involving expletive ha-; (2) desemanticized possession verbs; (3) presentational nga-+ demonstrative; (4) desemanticized perception verbs. Pragmatically speaking, clefts are primarily used for marking argument focus and presentationals for sentence focus. Accordingly, we argue here that unlike what several cross-linguistic typologies propose (e.g., Furukawa 1996; Léard 1992; Lambrecht 2001), presentationals cannot be considered as a subtype of cleft constructions in Kirundi.