On the Logic of Word Order in Hungarian

Kenesei, István

doi:10.1075/la.4.08ken

Cited by 124 publications

(41 citation statements)

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“…The choice between competing proposals is immaterial for the purposes of this paper. 6 Once again, (3b) is a simplified structure that is compatible with various syntactic structures proposed in the literature (see Surányi cleft--like construction, in which the background is associated with an existential 1 presupposition (Kenesei 1986, Szabolcsi 1994; see footnote 4). 2 Hungarian is not only focus--prominent, but it is also topic--prominent (É.…”

Section: Background On Hungariansupporting

confidence: 52%

The prosodic expression of focus, contrast and givenness: A production study of Hungarian

Genzel

Ishihara

Surányi

2015

Lingua

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Section: Background On Hungariansupporting

confidence: 52%

The prosodic expression of focus, contrast and givenness: A production study of Hungarian

Genzel

Ishihara

Surányi

2015

Lingua

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“…It was pointed out first by Szabolcsi (1981) that the constituents situated in the [Spec,FocP] position, traditionally referred to as the focus position of the Hungarian sentence, are associated with an exhaustive interpretation. This means that whenever the person answering the wh-question in (4-a) knows that János not only missed the bus but also the train, her utterance of (4-b) is not only considered inappropriate but is downright false: Szabolcsi (1994) formalized this intuition (based on suggestions by Kenesei 1986) by postulating an operator responsible for the exhaustive/identificational reading, shown in (5). This means that the meaning of (6-a), with the DP két ember 'two people' in focus position, is to be represented as in (6-b): 4 (5) Szabolcsi (1994: 181, ex.…”

Section: Topp* Specmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scope marking and prosody in Hungarian

Gyuris

Jackson

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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The paper presents an analysis of the results of three perception experiments that aimed to investigate the scope of postverbal quantifiers in Hungarian. These experiments found no correlations between wide vs. narrow scope readings of postverbal quantifiers and their stressed vs. unstressed pronunciations, contradicting a widespread assumption. In addition to the dominance of scope interpretation that corresponds to the linear order of constituents, previously unnoticed effects of the syntactic or thematic role of the postverbal quantifier and of the type of preverbal operator in the same sentence were found. These might indicate a more complex interaction of several factors or point to a greater role of extra-grammatical effects in determining the scope of quantifiers in Hungarian than previously assumed. The paper also addresses methodological issues that arise in the course of eliciting scope judgments experimentally.

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“…When the Focus position is occupied, the verb particle obligatorily appears after the verb. This Focus position has been described as hosting constituents with an "identification by exclusion" value (see Kenesei 1986Kenesei , 2006, also referred to as "exhaustive focus", following Szabolcsi (1981).…”

Section: Focusmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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On the Logic of Word Order in Hungarian

Cited by 124 publications

References 0 publications

The prosodic expression of focus, contrast and givenness: A production study of Hungarian

The prosodic expression of focus, contrast and givenness: A production study of Hungarian

Scope marking and prosody in Hungarian

Licensing Double Negation in NC and non-NC languages

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