Journal of Uralic Linguistics - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2022

It-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 identificational focus and Destruel et al. (2015) coin them inquiry-terminating (IT) constructions. Despite their similarities, these constructions also exhibit one major distributional difference: Clefts are usually no natural answers to overt wh-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 wh-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.

This paper examines the semantics of -AN-suffixed numerals and quantifiers in Hungarian. The main aim is to provide a compositional analysis that captures the wide variety of uses of -AN-marked numerals. While in the literature -AN has been treated as an adverbial suffix, I claim that the -AN-marking on numerals and quantifiers is a different mechanism than its phonologically similar adverbial counterpart. I present a number of grammatical phenomena in support of the assumption that -AN is associated with the [+plural] and [+human] features and I propose that they are realized as a presupposition. I argue that -AN is a predicate at type , λx: HUMANS.(x) and show that -AN-suffixed numerals are complex predicates that presuppose a plurality of human beings and have the cardinality property provided by the numeral. In accounting for all positions -AN-marked numerals and quantifiers occur in, two main categories emerge: the predicative position and adnominal pronominal constructions.

This paper presents a unified outlook on the syntax of constructions featuring the reflexive clitic se, with particular emphasis on the uniform morphosyntax of the Hungarian element -ik, treated as an exponent of se both in the verbal domain and in the nominal domain (in ordinal numeral constructions). The analysis is couched in the syntax of predication proposed in Den Dikken (2006), with se represented as the subject of a reverse predication.

This paper revisits the Verbal Identity Requirement on V-stranding ellipsis in Hungarian, and argues that verb movement out of an ellipsis site does not require the verb to be lexically identical to its antecedent in contexts where emphasis is on the polarity. By showing that lexical identity need not be satisfied in case V-stranding is accompanied by a response particle, we argue that whenever the response particle is missing the preference for identity is not triggered by ellipsis in this language, but is due to a pragmatic inference.