Anaphoric pronoun resolution in spoken language has been shown to be influenced by the first mention bias. While this bias has been well investigated in spoken languages, less is known about a similar bias in sign languages. In sign languages, pronominal pointing signs (index) are directed… read more
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.… read more
We present novel experimental evidence on the availability and the status of exhaustivity inferences with focus partitioning in German, English, and Hungarian. Results suggest that German and English focus-background clefts and Hungarian focus share important properties, (É. Kiss 1998, 1999;… read more
Most definitions of the narratological notion of internal focalization are cast in terms of what the text represents, namely some character and her point of view. In being thus couched in representational terms, definitions of internal focalization do not mention any linguistic surface properties… read more