Contextual triggers of the Hungarian pre-verbal focus structure

Káldi, Tamás; Madarász, Levente; Babarczy, Anna

doi:10.1075/atoh.16.04kal

Cited by 1 publication

(3 citation statements)

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“…Such theories, however (see e.g., Kiss, 1998 ; Kenesei, 2006 ) have not been supported by experimental data (see e.g., Onea and Beaver, 2009 ; Kas and Lukács, 2013 ; Gerocs et al, 2014 ; Káldi et al, 2016 ; Káldi and Babarczy, 2018 ). Furthermore, recent experimental evidence suggest that the use of focus may not only be strictly motivated by linguistic factors, and that these factors should be best seen as pragmatic ones (Stevens and Roberts, 2019 ; Káldi et al, 2020 ). Therefore, we contend that the gist of the two sentence types at hand were the same in our experiments.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Consider the dialogue in (5) in which A's question requests the identification of the individuals invited by John. The answer in B1 is acceptable, since the element carrying new information is marked for focus, while the answer in B2 sounds rather odd, since the respective element sits post-verbally (for further theoretical explanation see Roberts, 1998;Surányi, 2011, for experimental results see Káldi et al, 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One empirical work studied the relation of preVf and its function of evoking sets. Káldi et al ( 2020 ) examined the contextual effects that trigger the use of preVf in a semi-guided production study. Results revealed that preVf is produced reliably in contexts that contain an explicit or implicit set of focus alternatives.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Hungarian Structural Focus: Accessibility to Focused Elements and Their Alternatives in Working Memory and Delayed Recognition Memory

2021

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The present work investigates the memory accessibility of linguistically focused elements and the representation of the alternatives for these elements (i.e., their possible replacements) in Working Memory (WM) and in delayed recognition memory in the case of the Hungarian pre-verbal focus construction (preVf). In two probe recognition experiments we presented preVf and corresponding focusless neutral sentences embedded in five-sentence stories. Stories were followed by the presentation of sentence probes in one of three conditions: (i) the probe was identical to the original sentence in the story, (ii) the focused word (i.e., target) was replaced by a semantically related word and (iii) the target word was replaced by a semantically unrelated but contextually suitable word. In Experiment 1, probes were presented immediately after the stories measuring WM performance, while in Experiment 2, blocks of six stories were presented and sentences were probed with a 2-minute delay measuring delayed recognition memory performance. Results revealed an advantage of the focused element in immediate but not in delayed retrieval. We found no effect of sentence type on the recognition of the two different probe types in WM performance. However, results pertaining to the memory accessibility of focus alternatives in delayed retrieval showed an interference effect resulting in a lower memory performance. We conclude that this effect is indirect evidence for the enhanced activation of focus alternatives. The present work is novel in two respects. First, no study has been conducted on the memory representation of focused elements and their alternatives in the case of the structurally marked Hungarian pre-verbal focus construction. Second, to our knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the focus representation accounts for WM and delayed recognition memory using the same stimuli and same measured variables. Since both experiments used exactly the same stimulus set, and they only differed in terms of the timing of recognition probes, the principle of ceteris paribus fully applied with respect to how we addressed our research question regarding the two different memory systems.

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