M. Vanhove. The contrastive particle na/ni in Beja (North-Cushitic) // N. Sumbatova, I. Kapitonov, M. Khachaturyan, S. Oskolskaya, S. Verhees (eds.). Songs and Trees: Papers in Memory of Sasha Vydrina. St. Petersburg: Institute for Linguistic Studies, Rus
M. Vanhove. The contrastive particle na/ni in Beja (North-Cushitic) // N. Sumbatova, I. Kapitonov, M. Khachaturyan, S. Oskolskaya, S. Verhees (eds.). Songs and Trees: Papers in Memory of Sasha Vydrina. St. Petersburg: Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, 2023. P. 345-362.
Based on a corpus of semi-spontaneous data, this article is a first description and analysis of the functions of the Beja contrastive discourse particle na / ni within a functional, pragmatic and discourse organisation approach. It is shown that this particle is a marker of semantic opposition, denial of expectation, including adversativity, concessivity and mirativity, and possibly marginally a topic marker.