Morphological marking of contrast in Tima

Tima (Niger-Congo, Sudan) has two morphological markers to express contrast, a focus marker and a so-called selective marker. Defining contrast as signalling alternatives, we show that the focus marker in Tima indicates alternatives that involve exhaustivity, and that it may also signal mirativity. The selective marker merely indicates alternatives which are established on the basis of nominal modifiers. We take the distribution of both markers and their interaction as evidence for contrast being a gradient phenomenon rather than a categorical one. For Tima, we propose three dimensions of features that can account for the expression of contrast by the focus and the selective marker: the type of contribution that the contrasted element makes to the current question under discussion, exhaustivity, and mirativity. Using these three dimensions, we argue for a weaker type of contrast in which we typically find the selective marker, and for a stronger type of contrast which licenses focus marking.