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Part of
Approaches to Hungarian: Volume 16: Papers from the 2017 Budapest Conference
Edited by Veronika Hegedűs and Irene Vogel
[Approaches to Hungarian 16] 2020
► pp. 73–96

Contextual triggers of the Hungarian pre-verbal focus structure

A guided production study

 | Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences | Department of Cognitive Sciences, Budapest University of Technology and Economics
 | Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
 | Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences | Department of Cognitive Sciences, Budapest University of Technology and Economics
The study uses a novel experimental method to investigate contextual factors claimed in the theoretical literature to license the use of Hungarian pre-verbal focus. These factors are: (i) identification, (ii) contrast, (iii) availability of a set on which the focus operates and (iv) whether this set is explicit or implicit. We tested the effects of these factors using online surveys in which respondents read short texts describing a context and saw a cloud of randomly arranged words. The experimental task was to create sentences that naturally fit the context by clicking the words in the cloud. Results show that narrow identification and contrast reliably predict the use of pre-verbal focus as does the availability of a set regardless of explicitness.
Keywords: Hungarian focus, word order, identification, contrast, contextual factors, production experiment, information packaging
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Hungarian: A free word-order language
    • 1.2Accounts of word order: Discourse configurationality
    • 1.3The structures investigated in the present study
    • 1.4What is Focus?
    • 1.5Contextual factors commonly associated with preVf and neutral sentences
      • 1.5.1Identification
      • 1.5.2Contrast
    • 1.6The goal of the present study, hypotheses
  • 2.Experiments
    • 2.1Experiment 1
      • 2.1.1Participants
      • 2.1.2Procedure
      • 2.1.3Materials
      • 2.1.4Predictions
      • 2.1.5Results
      • 2.1.6Discussion
    • 2.2Experiment 2
      • 2.2.1Participants
      • 2.2.2Procedure
      • 2.2.3Materials
      • 2.2.4Predictions
      • 2.2.5Results
      • 2.2.6Discussion
  • 3.General discussion
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 8 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/atoh.16.04kal
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Cited by one other publication

Káldi, Tamás, Ágnes Szöllösi & Anna Babarczy
2021. Hungarian Structural Focus: Accessibility to Focused Elements and Their Alternatives in Working Memory and Delayed Recognition Memory. Frontiers in Psychology 12 DOI logo

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