Cover not available

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. 127–153

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB

The semantics of ejsze in the Székely dialect of Hungarian

 | Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics | Eötvös Loránd University
Open Access logo
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

This article was made Open Access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license through payment of an APC by or on behalf of the author.

Published online: 19 June 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jul.00017.gyu
Abstract
This paper provides the first formal account of the meaning of the pragmatic marker ejsze in the Székely (Szekler) dialect of Hungarian. Using standard diagnostics of sentence types, we argue that it is compatible with declaratives and constituent interrogatives but not with polar interogatives. We suggest that it makes a contribution analogous to that of German wohl in declaratives, and argue that its use-conditional meaning can be described along the lines proposed for wohl by Eckardt, Regine. 2020. Conjectural questions: The case of German verb-final wohl questions. Semantics and Pragmatics 131. 1–54. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar. Accordingly, ejsze is analyzed as an inferential evidential, marking that the prejacent is defeasibly entailed by the maximal body of knowledge of the speaker. The paper discusses contrasts between the distribution and felicity of ejsze vs. wohl, and ejsze vs. talán, an inferential particle that appears both in the standard and in the Székely dialect.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and previous work
  • 2.Ejsze: form and functions
    • 2.1Position in declaratives
    • 2.2Compatibility with different sentence types
    • 2.3Ejsze only contributes to the use conditions
    • 2.4Informal observations on certain uses of ejsze
  • 3.Towards formalizing the interpretation of ejsze
    • 3.1Proposal
    • 3.2Extensions
    • 3.3Comparing ejsze and talán ‘perhaps’
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (46)
References
Aijmer, Karin. 2015. The Swedish modal particle väl in a contrastive perspective. Nordic Journal of English Studies 141. 174–200. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
B. Lőrinczy, Éva (ed.). 1988. Új magyar tájszótár. [New Hungarian dictionary of regional expressions]. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Beaver, David I. & Brady Z. Clark. 2008. Sense and sensitivity: How focus determines meaning. Chicester: Wiley-Blackwell. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Csűry, Bálint. 1930. A székely és csángó mondathanglejtés [The Székely and the Csángó sentence intonation]. Magyar Nyelv 261. 249–254.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Davis, Christopher, Christopher Potts & Margaret Speas. 2007. The pragmatic values of evidential sentences. Semantics and Linguistic Theory 171. 71–88. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eckardt, Regine. 2020. Conjectural questions: The case of German verb-final wohl questions. Semantics and Pragmatics 131. 1–54. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eckardt, Regine & Andrea Beltrama. 2019. Evidentials and questions. In Christopher Pinon (ed.), Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 121. 121–155. Paris: CSSP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
É. Kiss, Katalin. 2002. The syntax of Hungarian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Faller, Martina T. 2002. Semantics and pragmatics of evidentials in Cuzco Quechua. Stanford, CA: Stanford University dissertation.
Farkas, Donka F. 2022. Non-intrusive questions as a special type of non-canonical questions. Journal of Semantics 391. 295–337. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2023. Bias and anti-bias: two case studies from Hungarian. Journal of Uralic Linguistics 21. 96–126. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gärtner, Hans-Martin & Beáta Gyuris. 2012. Pragmatic markers in Hungarian: Some introductory remarks. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 591. 387–426. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. to appear. What does vajon contribute? In Radek Šimik, Kateřina Hrdinková, Maria Onoeva & Anna Staňková (eds.), Sinn und Bedeutung 271.
Göbel, Alex. 2018. Evidentiality and undirected questions: A new account of the German discourse particle wohl. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 241. 77–86.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gunlogson, Christine. 2003. True to form: Rising and falling declaratives as questions in English. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gutzmann, Daniel. 2015. Use-conditional meaning: Studies in multidimensional semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gyuris, Beáta. 2017. New perspectives on bias in polar questions: A study of Hungarian -e. International Review of Pragmatics 91. 1–50. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2019. Thoughts on the semantics and pragmatics of rising declaratives in English and rise-fall declaratives in Hungarian. In Beáta Gyuris, Katalin Mády & Gábor Recski (eds.), K + K = 120. Papers dedicated to László Kálmán and András Kornai on the occasion of their 60th birthdays, 247–280. Budapest: MTA Nyelvtudományi Intézet.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 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, 355–380. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gyuris, Beáta, Katalin Mády & Cecília Sarolta Molnár. 2021. Kísérletek kérdő mondatokkal: Munkamegosztás és dialektális különbségek [Experiments with interrogatives: Division of labour and dialectal differences]. Talk given at Pragmatika Kerekasztal: Kísérletes Pragmatika Magyarországon [Pragmatics Roundtable: Experimental Pragmatics in Hungary]. 10 September 2021, University of Debrecen.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gyuris, Beáta & Csenge Nagy. 2021. Talán and ejsze: a comparative study of inferential particles in two dialects. Talk given at ICSH15, University of Pécs, 25 August 2021.
Heycock, Caroline. 2017. Embedded root phenomena. In Martin Everaert & Henk van Riemsdijk (eds.), The Wiley Blackwell companion to syntax. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Huszthy, Bálint & Bíborka Sándor. 2021. Székely hanglejtésformák: Egy székelyudvarhelyi esettanulmány [Székely intonational patterns: A case study from Székelyudvarhely]. In Katalin Balogné Bérces, Attila Hegedűs & Balázs Surányi (eds.), Nyelvelmélet és dialektológia 5, 107–129. Budapest: PPKE BTK Elméleti Nyelvészeti Tanszék – Magyar Nyelvészeti Tanszék.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Incurvati, Luca & Julian J. Schlöder. 2019. Weak assertion. The Philosophical Quarterly 691. 741–770. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ittzés, Nóra (ed.) 2016. A magyar nyelv nagyszótára VI. [Comprehensive Dictionary of Hungarian VI]. Budapest: MTA Nyelvtudományi Intézet.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Juhász, Dezső. 2001. A magyar nyelvjárások területi egységei: A nyelvjárási régiók [Geographical units of Hungarian dialects: Dialectal regions]. In Jenő Kiss (ed.), Magyar dialektológia [Hungarian dialectology], 262–316. Budapest: Osiris Kiadó.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kenesei, István. 1994. Subordinate clauses. In Ferenc Kiefer & Katalin É. Kiss (eds.), The syntactic structure of Hungarian (Syntax and Semantics 27), 274–354. San Diego: Academic Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kiefer, Ferenc. 1981. What is possible in Hungarian? Acta Linguistica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 311. 147–185.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2018. Two kinds of epistemic modality in Hungarian. In Zlatka Guentchéva (ed.), Epistemic modalities and evidentiality in cross-linguistic perspective, 281–295. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Krifka, Manfred. 2021. Modelling questions in commitment spaces. In Moritz Cordes (ed.), Asking and answering: Rivalling approaches to interrogative methods, 63–95. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
König, Ekkehard & Peter Siemund. 2007. Speech act distinctions in grammar. In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, Vol. 1, 276–324. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Littell, Patrick, Lisa Matthewson & Tyler Peterson. 2010. On the semantics of conjectural questions. University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics 281, 89–104. Vancuver: UBCWPL.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Murray, Sarah E. 2017. The semantics of evidentials. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Oravecz, Csaba, Tamás Váradi & Bálint Sass. 2014. The Hungarian Gigaword Corpus. In Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asunción Moreno, Jan Odijk & Stelios Piperidis (eds.) LREC 2014 – Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evalutation, 1719–1723. Reykjavík: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Potts, Christopher. 2007. The expressive dimension. Theoretical Linguistics 331. 165–198. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Roberts, Craige. 2012. Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. Semantics and Pragmatics 51. 1–69. Originally appeared in Jae-Hak Toon & Andreas Kathol (eds.), Papers in Semantics. OSU Working Papers in Linguistics 491, 91–136. Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State University Department of Linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rooth, Mats. 1985. Association with focus. Amherst MA: University of Massachusetts dissertation.
. 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 11. 75–116. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rullmann, Hotze, Lisa Matthewson & Henry Davis. 2008. Modals as distributive indefinites. Natural Language Semantics 161. 317–357. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
San Roque, Lila, Simeon Floyd & Elisabeth Norcliffe. 2017. Evidentiality and interrogativity. Lingua 1861. 120–143. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sweetser, Eve. 1990. From etymology to pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tuzson, Edit. 2022. Az ejsze szó használata Csíkszenttamáson [The use of the word ejsze in Csíkszenttamás]. Cluj: Babes-Bolyai University MA-thesis.
Varga, László. 2010. Boundary tones and the lack of intermediate phrase in Hungarian (revisiting the Hungarian calling contour). The Even Yearbook, 1–27. Budapest: Department of English Linguistics, Eötvös Loránd University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue