Abstract

This paper can be seen in part as an attempt to follow up suggestions by Harlow in his 1982 paper to the NZ Linguistic Society Conference on the relationship between ko and notions such as ‘topic’ and ‘focus’. However, the stimulus to reconsider the area came from a different source: from my observation that the suprasegmental features associated with ko-phrases provided by Maori-speaking consultants varied in different contexts. The paper outlines those data, and suggests on the basis of them that the sorts of conjectures made by Harlow in 1982 are supported by the distribution of suprasegmentals.

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