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Approaches to Hungarian 17: Special issue of the Journal on Uralic Linguistics 1:2 (2022)
Edited by Tamás Halm, Elizabeth Coppock and Balázs Surányi
[Journal of Uralic Linguistics 1:2] 2022
► pp. 154–180

Answering overt wh-questions

How similar are Hungarian pre-verbal focus and English it-clefts?

ORCID logo | University of Graz , Austria

It-clefts in English, their French and German counterparts and pre-verbal focus in Hungarian have been claimed to be semantically related constructions. For example, É. Kiss (1998) terms them identificational focus and Destruel et al. (2015) coin them inquiry-terminating (IT) constructions. Despite their similarities, these constructions also exhibit one major distributional difference: Clefts are usually no natural answers to overt wh-questions whereas pre-verbal focus in Hungarian constitutes the default question-answering strategy. In this paper, I show that it is possible to account for this difference within the Rational Speech Act model (Frank & Goodman 2012) without assuming any semantic differences between the structures. Thereby, I capitalize on the number of alternative constructions that could be used to answer overt wh-questions in the various languages under discussion and on a remarkable semantic property of the constructions under discussion that relates to the way they encode exhaustivity.

Keywords: Hungarian focus, it-clefts, exhaustivity, question under discussion, rational speech acts
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The problem
    • 2.1Background
    • 2.2Answers to overt wh-questions
  • 3.The basic case
    • 3.1The framework
    • 3.2The semantics
    • 3.3Analysis
  • 4.Subject–object-asymmetries
    • 4.1The data
    • 4.2Analysis
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jul.00008.one
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