This paper is concerned with the status of bound forms in compounds and other lexical items, but it ultimately aims at setting up a hierarchy of lexical items of various degrees of "freedom", making use of clear-cut criteria applicable in at least one (fairly large) group of languages. In spite of the difficulties of the various (phonological, morphological, lexical, and semantic) definitions of 'word', Bloomfield's characterization of minimum free forms is applied to designate items at the top of the hierarchy, which are called 'autonomous words'. Bound forms that allow autonomous words to occur between them and the lexical item they are bound to are 'dependent words'. The novelty of this paper lies in dividing the rest of the lexical items "below", i.e., 'nonwords', into three groups: semiwords, affixoids, and affixes, based on a new application of a familiar operation, coordination reduction, which is shown to work both backward and forward for some items, but only backward reduction is possible for others.
Recent attempts to define the functions and domains of focus make a distinction between information focus on the one hand and identificational or contrastive focus on the other. While both types of focus are claimed here to be identificational, they differ in that information focus incorporates a weaker relationship between the set of individuals identified and the relevant set of elements in the discourse available to both speaker and hearer. In a reexamination of focus domains in Hungarian, a focus-sensitive language, it is shown that they have been taken to be too restrictive and too broad at the same time: a number of syntactic constituents previously disqualified can be interpreted as focussed provided both syntactic and prosodic factors are taken into consideration, while others prove to be focussable only as parts of larger syntactic and semantic units.
This paper is concerned with a construction in which multiple foci are found in front of the inflected verb, contrary to the accepted view on focussing in Hungarian, which allows for only one constituent there. Since earlier proposals for multiple wh-question constructions or multiple (postverbal) foci cannot be extended to cover the new cases, a new analysis is put forward based upon the assumption that Neg does not attract Tense and that wh-phrases must be licensed by Comp. The phenomenon of negative concord is invoked to provide independent evidence for the analyses presented. The interaction of negated universal quantifiers with negative concord quantifiers and focus is also examined in order to argue for the checking mechanisms at work in this language.
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