Article published In: Approaches to Hungarian 18: Special issue of the Journal of Uralic Linguistics 2:1 (2023)
Edited by Donka F. Farkas, Gábor Alberti and Balázs Surányi
[Journal of Uralic Linguistics 2:1] 2023
► pp. 96–126
Bias and anti-bias
Two case studies from Hungarian
Published online: 19 June 2023
https://doi.org/10.1075/jul.00016.far
https://doi.org/10.1075/jul.00016.far
Abstract
This paper proposes an account of the interpretive effects of two discourse particles in Hungarian, talán and vajon, within the view of context and context change developed in Farkas, Donka F. & Floris Roelofsen. 2017. Division of labor in the interpretation of declaratives and interrogatives. Journal of Semantics 341. 237–289. , and shows that the restrictions on their distribution follow from their interpretive properties. Building on Gyuris, Beáta. 2022. Evidentiality and the QUD: A study of talán ‘perhaps’ in Hungarian declaratives and interrogatives. In Remus Gergel, Ingo Reich, & Augustin Speyer (eds.), Particles in German, English, and beyond (Studies in Language Companion Series 224), 355–380. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. , talán will be treated as signaling epistemic bias in both declaratives and interrogatives. Following Farkas, Donka F. 2022. Non-intrusive questions as a special type of non-canonical questions. Journal of Semantics 391. 295–337. , vajon will be treated as a non-intrusive question marker, which, in the account proposed, is incompatible with bias markers. The restrictions on the sentence types in which these particles occur, as well as the fact that there are restrictions on their co-occurence, will be derived from their interpretive contribution.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Empirical generalizations
- 3.Theoretical preliminaries
- 3.1The denotation of declarative and interrogative sentences
- 3.2Context structures (with new details)
- 3.3Conventional discourse effects
- 4.Talán as a bias marker
- 4.1What is bias?
- 4.2Talán as a marker of speech act bias
- 4.3Capturing the sentence-type distributional restrictions on talán
- 5.Vajon as a non-intrusive question marker
- 5.1Main contexts in which vajon can occur
- 5.1.1Self-addressed questions
- 5.1.2Known and unknown answers
- 5.2The contribution of vajon
- 5.3Accounting for the distribution of vajon
- 5.1Main contexts in which vajon can occur
- 6.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
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Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Gyuris, Beáta
2023. The semantics of ejsze in the Székely dialect of Hungarian. Journal of Uralic Linguistics 2:1 ► pp. 127 ff.
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