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Article published In: Approaches to Hungarian 17: Special issue of the Journal on Uralic Linguistics 1:2 (2022)
Edited by Tamás Halm, Elizabeth Coppock and Balázs Surányi
[Journal of Uralic Linguistics 1:2] 2022
► pp. 154–180

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Answering overt wh-questions

How similar are Hungarian pre-verbal focus and English it-clefts?

ORCiD logo with link | University of Graz, Austria
Published online: 17 November 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jul.00008.one
Abstract
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, Katalin. 1998. Identificational focus versus information focus. Language 741. 245–273. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar terms them identificational focus and Destruel, Emilie, Daniel Velleman, Edgar Onea, Dylan Bumford, Jingyang Xue & David Beaver. 2015. A cross-linguistic study of the non-at-issueness of exhaustive inferences. In Florian Schwarz (ed.), Experimental perspectives on presuppositions, 135–156. Heidelberg and Berlin: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar 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, Michael C. & Noah D. Goodman. 2012. Predicting pragmatic reasoning in language games. Science 336 (6084). 998. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) 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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The problem
    • 2.1Background
    • 2.2Answers to overt wh-questions
  • 3.The basic case
    • 3.1The framework
    • 3.2The semantics
    • 3.3Analysis
  • 4.Subject–object-asymmetries
    • 4.1The data
    • 4.2Analysis
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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