(Non-)exhaustivity in focus partitioning across languages
- 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; Szabolcsi 1994; Percus 1997; Onea & Beaver 2009). Those constructions are anaphoric devices triggering an existence presupposition. EXH-inferences are not obligatory in such constructions in English, German, or Hungarian, against some previous literature (Percus 1997; Büring & Križ 2013; É. Kiss 1998), but in line with pragmatic analyses of EXH-inferences in clefts (Horn 1981, 2016; Pollard & Yasavul 2016). The cross-linguistic differences in the distribution of EXH-inferences are attributed to properties of the Hungarian number marking system.
| Author details: | Malte ZimmermannORCiDGND, Joseph P. De Veaugh-GeissORCiDGND, Swantje TönnisORCiD, Edgar OneaORCiDGND |
|---|---|
| Title of parent work (English): | Approaches to Hungarian |
| Publisher: | John Benjamins |
| Place of publishing: | Amsterdam |
| Publication type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Publication year: | 2020 |
| Release date: | 2021/11/02 |
| Tag: | Hungarian focus; clefts; definite pseudoclefts; exhaustivity; experimental evidence; semantics-pragmatics interface |
| Volume: | 16 |
| Number of pages: | 24 |
| Funding institution: | Universität Potsdam |
| Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
| DDC classification: | 4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik |
| Peer review: | Referiert |
| Publishing method: | Open Access / Gold Open-Access |
| License (German): |  CC-BY-NC-ND - Namensnennung, nicht kommerziell, keine Bearbeitungen 4.0 International |
| External remark: | Zweitveröffentlichung in der Schriftenreihe Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe ; 724 |
