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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. 239–278

Response particles and verbal identity

| Leiden University , The Netherlands

This paper revisits the Verbal Identity Requirement on V-stranding ellipsis in Hungarian, and argues that verb movement out of an ellipsis site does not require the verb to be lexically identical to its antecedent in contexts where emphasis is on the polarity. By showing that lexical identity need not be satisfied in case V-stranding is accompanied by a response particle, we argue that whenever the response particle is missing the preference for identity is not triggered by ellipsis in this language, but is due to a pragmatic inference.

Keywords: ellipsis, ellipsis identity, head movement, response particles, verb-echo answers
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Verb-stranding ellipsis in verb-echos in Hungarian
    • 2.1Arguments for V-stranding ellipsis
    • 2.2The configuration of V-stranding ellipsis
  • 3.The verbal identity requirement
  • 4.Response particles remove the need for identity
    • 4.1Affirmative verb-echos with and without igen
    • 4.2Findings of a questionnaire study
    • 4.3The same pattern in other echo answers: Negative and reversing echos
  • 5.Towards defining the need for identity in verb-echos
  • 6.Conclusion and outlook
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 17 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jul.00011.lip
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