Quantification in Hungarian

We discuss the semantics of prenominal "zero", as in "I have zero new emails in my inbox". We show that "zero" is not a quantifier like "no" and that giving "zero" a regular numeral semantics is possible and desirable. We formulate such an analysis and its consequences. We show that the existence of a zero numeral has profound consequences for linguistic semantics. We conclude that the fact that languages allow ascription of zero quantity to an entity provides evidence that linguistic semantics has access to what at first sight may seem like an ontological oddity: an entity with zero quantity. In other words, we will show that studying "zero" can inform us about the underlying semantic ontology of natural language.

Section: Distributional Differencesmentioning

confidence: 58%

On “zero” and semantic plurality

Bylinina

Nouwen

2018

“…Szabolcsi 1997;2010;É. Kiss 2002 andCsirmaz &Szabolcsi 2012 for overviews.) 3 (3) illustrates some of the DP types Szabolcsi (1997) lists among the possible occupants of the topic and the quantifier positions, respectively.…”

Section: Topp* Specmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scope marking and prosody in Hungarian

Gyuris

Jackson

2018

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.

“…This position seems to have been influenced by the prominent idea originally proposed in Pesetsky (1987), that there are "languages that wear their LFs on their sleeves" (Pesetsky 1987: 117). Pesetsky advanced this idea in a discussion of Polish wh-movement, but it was quickly extended to other languages and is now most often used to describe Hungarian, which is known as a language that disambiguates its LF relations through overt movement (see Kiss 1991;Szabolcsi 1997 andCsirmaz &Szabolcsi 2012 for a detailed discussion of Hungarian data).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifier Scope in Russian

Antonyuk

2019

This paper documents certain quantifier scope ambiguities in Russian and argues that these are derived by means of a covert syntactic movement operation, Quantifier Raising (QR). By doing so, it argues against the popular "frozen scope" view of Russian (Ionin 2003) by showing that optional, non-local QR past vP level must be available in the language in exactly the contexts where it is available in English. Syntactic evidence for the parallelism comes from Inverse Linking, Antecedent Contained Deletion and other contexts that have been argued to point to the existence of QR in English. Additionally, evidence for the availability of subject Reconstruction for scope in Russian (contra Ionin 2003) strongly suggests that the mechanism deriving ambiguity in basic SVO sentences in Russian must involve subject Reconstruction plus object QR to vP, exactly as has been argued to be necessary for English in Johnson (2000; 2001). The conclusion that Russian possesses QR with the same properties known from English suggests that the availability of QR in certain languages or certain constructions should not be tied to the unavailability of Scrambling since Russian also exhibits Scrambling. This conclusion thus carries important implications for other languages still currently taken to be similarly scope frozen due to the availability of Scrambling.