Focus sensitivity in Hungarian adults and children

Abstract

Focus sentences in Hungarian are claimed to express exhaustive identification by a syntactic-semantic operator in standard generative descriptions, but there are also arguments against this view. Our study aimed to gather empirical evidence for the exhaustive interpretation of focus sentences and to explore developmental changes with age. Two groups of children (mean ages 6;3 and 10;8 years) and a group of adults participated in a picture-sentence verification task that systematically varied sentence and context types. Adults showed a marked sensitivity for focus as a group, but focus sensitivity was not evident in either group of children. All participant groups were remarkably inconsistent in distinguishing neutral and focus sentences. In spite of the measurable sensitivity to focus in adults, the pattern of the results contradicts the predictions of the syntactic-semantic operator model concerning exhaustive interpretation, and urges further research.

Scope marking and prosody in Hungarian

“…7 The assumption that the constituents in the preverbal focus position of the Hungarian sentence have an exhaustive or identificational reading has recently been called into question by researchers on the basis of certain processing experiments, e.g. Onea & Beaver (2011), Kas & Lukács (2013), and Gerőcs et al (2014). However, we are not convinced that the experimental data reported on in these papers necessarily forces one to the conclusions drawn by the respective authors.…”

Quantifier spreading: children misled by ostensive cues

“…Here we only cite one further example. It has been tested in several experiments (e.g., Beaver & Onea 2011; Kas & Lukács 2013;Pintér 2016) whether the exhaustivity of the preverbal focus of the Hungarian sentence (corresponding roughly to an English cleft constituent) is an inherent semantic property or a cancellable pragmatic implicature. The tasks involved truth value judgements; experimenters aimed to find out whether children and adults accept a focus construction like (11) as a true description of a non-exhaustive situation like that in Figure 11 (both cited from Pintér 2016): (11) A NYUSZI emelte fel a zászlót.…”

Indexical demonstratives and identificational focus in Hungarian

“…This view has been challenged recently, for instance by Wedgwood (2005), who claims that exhaustivity is an implicature in a relevance theoretical framework, and by Balogh (2009), who argues that exhaustivity is an obligatory implicature in an inquisitive semantic framework. Empirical studies have also questioned the standard semantic feature theory (for details see Kas and Lukács 2013;Gerőcs et al 2014). In her more recent papers É.…”