Chapter published in:
Analogy and Contrast in Language: Perspectives from Cognitive Linguistics
Edited by Karolina Krawczak, Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Marcin Grygiel
[Human Cognitive Processing 73] 2022
► pp. 83–114

Chapter 4
‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend.’

Similarities motivated by contrasts in Hungarian sentence structure

| Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest

In Hungarian generative grammar, the terms topic and focus designate structural positions associated with logico-semantic functions. The present chapter highlights the fact that elements sharing the behaviour of “topics” and “foci” are highly varied, and that logico-semantic definitions only capture prioritized subsets of the relevant data. I argue that preverbal, inversion-triggering elements (“foci” and the negative particle) are overriders, with their semantic commonality depending on relationships of contrast vis-à-vis a baseline clause type, that of neutral positive declarative clauses. With regard to sentence-initial, weakly stressed expressions (“topics” and “sentence adverbials”), I propose that they are contextualizers, generating supporting context for the processing of a message. Here, the baseline can be identified as the situation where no explicit contextualization is necessary. The possibility for two patterns to be similar indirectly, by virtue of standing in contrast with a third one, will be referred to as the ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ principle of linguistic organization.

Keywords: baseline, contextualization, contrast, focus, overriding, topic
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Shared behaviour, diverse meanings: Two puzzles of Hungarian sentence structure
  • 3.Inversion as a way of marking departures from baseline clauses. “Foci” as overriders
  • 4.Topics as a subtype of contextualizers
  • 5.Summary and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 October 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.73.04imr
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