ABSTRACT
Following Lambrecht (1994: 206) I consider a position of focus to convey information which is unpredictable, not derivable from, context. Its information status is typically new. Furthermore, I assume that there are positions which usually contain the focus of an utterance. Among these are the direct object, the subject
of existential expressions, and predicates of non-verbal sentences. Furthermore, there is a correlation between the grammatical distribution of a noun and its pragmatic function (Lambrecht 1994: 262). In the codeswitching literature, linguists have noted a link between focus and sentence-final position, i.e. the object (Boumans 1998; Muysken 2000; Myers-Scotton 1993; Owens 2005b). This link can also be found in MA-French codeswitching (Bentahila and Davies 1983: 313). The data supply frequent French object NP as focus. In the examples, French is in italics, MA in normal type.
