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Existential Constructions across Languages: Forms, meanings and functions
Edited by Laure Sarda and Ludovica Lena
[Human Cognitive Processing 76] 2023
► pp. 180–218

Chapter 6
On a continuum from categorical to thetic judgment

Indefinite subjects and locatives in Hungarian and French

ORCID logo | University of Szeged
ORCID logo | LATTICE – CNRS, Ecole Normale Supérieure-PSL | Université Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle

This paper addresses the relationships between the existential reading of sentences with an indefinite subject and the presence of a spatial anchoring constituent. We investigated a corpus of French sentences with indefinite subjects in preverbal position and their translation into Hungarian. While French has a rather rigid word order, Hungarian is a discourse configurational language which signals the informational status of sentence constituents. Through the prism of differentiations made in the Hungarian translation, we distinguished two groups of indefinite subject sentences, one having a thetic interpretation, the other retaining a categorical – or categorical-like – interpretation despite the indefinite form of the subject. These sentences illustrate the fact that while indefinite NPs are known to be bad topics, they can nevertheless play this role to various degrees.

Keywords: coda constraints, contrastive analysis, discourse configurational language, informational structure, translation, word order
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Indefinites and spatio-temporal localization
    • 2.1Lack of topicality of weak indefinites
    • 2.2Obligatory vs. optional presence of a locative expression
  • 3.The corpus
  • 4.General observations
    • 4.1The ontology of the subject
    • 4.2Thematic role of the subject and presence of locatives
    • 4.3The Aktionsart of the sentence
    • 4.4The semantic classes of the eventualities
  • 5.Indefinite subjects in Hungarian
  • 6.Constraints on the locative in the Hungarian corpus
    • 6.1Subject in Topic position
    • 6.2Subject in VM position
    • 6.3The postverbal position
  • 7.Categorical and thetic judgments
    • 7.1Degrees of topicality and categorical judgment
    • 7.2VM position, thetic judgment and existentials
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 5 July 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.76.06gec
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