Configurationality in Hungarian

Kiss, Katalin É.

doi:10.1007/978-94-009-3703-1

Cited by 199 publications

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“…The canonical Focus position in Hungarian is the position to the immediate left of the inflected verb (see Brody 1990; É. Kiss 1987Kiss , 2002. When the Focus position is occupied, the verb particle obligatorily appears after the verb.…”

Section: Focusmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…What is just as problematic is that existentials are banned as well (É. Kiss 1987). Recall that the presence of an element in the Focus position triggers verb-particle inversion.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, they do not occupy the Focus position (examples from É. Kiss 1987 This has led Surányi to propose that the n-word in the Focus position is an indefinite, which needs to be bound by some operator, and depends on a distinct licensor.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Licensing Double Negation in NC and non-NC languages

Puskás

2012

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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The paper proposes a syntactic and semantic analysis of Double Negation (DN). It is shown that there are two types of DN. Strong DN is the result of a Focus construction that involves a polar reading triggered by a Verum Focus; Weak DN, on the other hand, arises when the corresponding n-word is marked as a Contrastive Topic and introduces weak (i.e. non exclusive) alternatives. The paper discusses the occurrence of these two kinds of DN in two types of languages, which feature different negative strategies. While Hungarian is a strict NC language with non-negative n-words and an obligatory negative marker, English and German are non-NC languages, with negative n-words that can function on their own. It is shown that both strong DN and weak DN occur in each of these languages. However, the mechanisms that license n-words contributing the DN reading are different, due to the differences in the nature of the n-words and in the discourse-functional behavior of the languages in question. Goal of the paperUntil recently, little real attention has been paid to the phenomenon of double negation. Much of what the literature says amounts to observations. However, it is generally recognized that the phenomenon does exist, and moreover, it coexists with negative concord in some languages (see e.g. Zeijlstra 2004). It has been described in some detail for French (Corblin 1996;Corblin & Tovena 2003) with observations as to the "special" contexts in which it occurs. De Swart is the first to dedicate a whole chapter to the phenomenon (de Swart 2010). She also mentions that double negation needs special contexts. Although her approach gives a reasoned account of the phenomenon, it is set in bidirectional Optimality Theory, a framework in which grammatical differences are modeled as constraint re-ranking, and which is thus incompatible with a minimalist approach.The goal of the paper is to give an account of double negation (henceforth DN) in a minimalist framework, taking as a stance that if the model it proposes is an adequate representation of linguistic knowledge, it should also be able to handle the rather tricky question of double negation for which native speakers have clear intuitions. One of the fundamental claims of a minimalist approach is that syntactic structures are identical crosslinguistically, a claim that leaves much of the burden of variation to the "periphery": "The primary [task] is to show that the apparent richness and diversity of linguistic phenomena is illusory and epiphenomenal, the result of interaction of fixed principles under slightly varying conditions" (Chomsky 1995: 8). Such an approach has been underlying much of the research on negation. It has led to, among other things, a debate about the nature of negative expressions-so-called n-words, following Laka's (1990) terminology. One line of thought proposes that n-words occurring in Negative Concord (henceforth NC) languages are intrinsically negative (cf. Haegeman 1995;Haegeman & Zanuttini 1996;Zanuttini 1997;Mathieu 2001;Corblin & Toven...

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Section: Focusmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…What is just as problematic is that existentials are banned as well (É. Kiss 1987). Recall that the presence of an element in the Focus position triggers verb-particle inversion.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Licensing Double Negation in NC and non-NC languages

Puskás

2012

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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“…É. Kiss 1987, Brody 1995and Szabolcsi 1997. These positions are all embedded under complementizers when in subordinated environments.…”

Section: The Clause Structure Of Hungarian: a Syntactic Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

The syntax of emphatic positive polarity in Hungarian: Evidence from ellipsis

Lipták¹

2013

Lingua

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“…According to É. Kiss (1987), the contrastive topics are placed into a left dislocated position, which explains why they license resumptive pronouns, why they are much less sensitive 3 positions can host the predicate-initial constituent: [Spec,DistP] Other things being equal, verbs in predicate-initial position, like the one in (1) above, can either receive a contrastive (or identificational) focus reading, where the interpretation of the verb is contrasted with one or more of its alternatives, or a verum focus (or polarity focus) reading, which contrasts the meaning of the whole sentence with its negation. To avoid misunderstanding, we will use verbs in the examples below for which the contrastive focus reading is less likely.…”

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Quantificational contrastive topics with verum/falsum focus

Gyuris

2009

Lingua

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The paper investigates a problem related to the distribution of quantificational determiners as contrastive topics in Hungarian sentences containing a verum/falsum focus. It is argued that the reason why certain sentences with the above structure turn out to be ill-formed is that their intended truth-conditional interpretations are in contradiction with the presuppositions introduced by the contrastive topic. Although this strategy is essentially the IntroductionThis paper investigates the interpretation of a constituent type normally situated on the left periphery of the sentence: quantificational DPs containing bare numeral determiners and modified numeral determiners like more than n or less than n that are pronounced with a 'contrastive', rising tone. The aim of the paper is to show that the investigation of the interpretations of sentences where such contrastive topics are followed by a verum or falsum focus can contribute in important ways to the study of the left periphery, since they provide a testing ground for theories aiming to account for the semantics/pragmatics of contrastive topics. The predictions of two such theories will be explored in the paper, primarily with the help of Hungarian data. The first theory is the one proposed by Büring (2003), according to which declaratives with contrastive topics presuppose the existence of a strategy, roughly, a (possibly implicit) preceding discourse with a main question and a subquestion. The second theory (also discussed in Gyuris, in press a, b), assumes that a contrastive topics introduce the presupposition that there is a function that maps the set of alternatives to the contrastive topic denotation onto the set of alternatives to the denotation of the focus of the same sentence.In the examples to follow, the rising tone on a word will be indicated with a forward slash, '/'. We will assume that the first constituent of the so-called predicate part of the sentence (i.e. the part following the topic(s), cf. É. Kiss 2002), which serves as the semantic focus, is obligatorily stressed, and is pronounced with a falling tone (cf. Kálmán et al. 1986 and Kálmán et al. 1989), and mark it with a backslash, '\'. Regarding syntactic labeling, we follow É. Kiss's (2002) relevant proposals, with one exception: the maximal projection that contains the constituent with the rise, which occupies one of the [Spec,TopP] positions of the sentence according to É. Kiss, will be placed into the specifier position of a CTopP projection, to be differentiated from ordinary topics. 1 In É. Kiss's framework, the following 1 Regarding the syntactic position of the contrastive topic, there are two dominant views in the literature, bothproposed by Katalin É. Kiss. According to É. Kiss (1987), the contrastive topics are placed into a left dislocated position, which explains why they license resumptive pronouns, why they are much less sensitive 3 positions can host the predicate-initial constituent: [Spec,DistP] Other things being equal, verbs in predicate-initial position, lik...

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Configurationality in Hungarian

Cited by 199 publications

References 0 publications

Licensing Double Negation in NC and non-NC languages

Licensing Double Negation in NC and non-NC languages

The syntax of emphatic positive polarity in Hungarian: Evidence from ellipsis

Quantificational contrastive topics with verum/falsum focus

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