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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. 207–230

(Non-)exhaustivity in focus partitioning across languages

| Universität Potsdam
| Universität Potsdam
| Universität Graz
| Universität Graz
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.
Keywords: clefts, definite pseudoclefts, Hungarian focus, exhaustivity, experimental evidence, semantics-pragmatics interface
Article outline
  • 1.Focus partitioning: A cross-linguistically unified discourse phenomenon
  • 2.Focus partitioning: Morphosyntax and interpretation
  • 3.Testing for EXH-inferences in an incremental information retrieval paradigm
    • 3.1Experimental set-up
    • 3.2Theoretical accounts and predictions for clefts and definite pseudoclefts
    • 3.3Procedure
  • 4.EXH-inference in German and English clefts: Results and analysis
    • 4.1Results: A first look
    • 4.2Post-hoc analysis: Different sub-groups
    • 4.3Accommodating discourse antecedents (Pollard & Yasavul 2016)
  • 5.Hungarian preverbal focus: Results and analysis
  • 6.Outlook: Anaphoricity vs. EXH-inferences in focus partitioning
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 8 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/atoh.16.10zim
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