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Volume 1, Issue 2
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Abstract

Abstract

-clefts in English, their French and German counterparts and pre-verbal focus in Hungarian have been claimed to be semantically related constructions. For example, É. Kiss (1998) terms them and Destruel et al. (2015) coin them . Despite their similarities, these constructions also exhibit one major distributional difference: Clefts are usually no natural answers to overt -questions whereas pre-verbal focus in Hungarian constitutes the default question-answering strategy. In this paper, I show that it is possible to account for this difference within the Rational Speech Act model (Frank & Goodman 2012) without assuming any semantic differences between the structures. Thereby, I capitalize on the number of alternative constructions that could be used to answer overt -questions in the various languages under discussion and on a remarkable semantic property of the constructions under discussion that relates to the way they encode exhaustivity.

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2022-11-17
2023-12-04

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Answering overt wh-questions
Journal of Uralic Linguistics 1, 154 (2022); https://doi.org/10.1075/jul.00008.one
/content/journals/10.1075/jul.00008.one
/content/journals/10.1075/jul.00008.one
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): exhaustivity; Hungarian focus; it-clefts; question under discussion; rational speech acts

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