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Article published In:
Approaches to Hungarian 18: Special issue of the Journal of Uralic Linguistics 2:1 (2023)
Edited by Donka F. Farkas, Gábor Alberti and Balázs Surányi
[Journal of Uralic Linguistics 2:1] 2023
► pp. 96–126

Bias and anti-bias

Two case studies from Hungarian

| UC Santa Cruz

This paper proposes an account of the interpretive effects of two discourse particles in Hungarian, talán and vajon, within the view of context and context change developed in Farkas & Roelofsen (2017), and shows that the restrictions on their distribution follow from their interpretive properties. Building on Gyuris (2022), talán will be treated as signaling epistemic bias in both declaratives and interrogatives. Following Farkas (2022), vajon will be treated as a non-intrusive question marker, which, in the account proposed, is incompatible with bias markers. The restrictions on the sentence types in which these particles occur, as well as the fact that there are restrictions on their co-occurence, will be derived from their interpretive contribution.

Keywords: discourse particles, biased questions, non-intrusive questions, sentence type restrictions, conventional discourse effects
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Empirical generalizations
  • 3.Theoretical preliminaries
    • 3.1The denotation of declarative and interrogative sentences
    • 3.2Context structures (with new details)
    • 3.3Conventional discourse effects
  • 4. Talán as a bias marker
    • 4.1What is bias?
    • 4.2 Talán as a marker of speech act bias
    • 4.3Capturing the sentence-type distributional restrictions on talán
  • 5. Vajon as a non-intrusive question marker
    • 5.1Main contexts in which vajon can occur
      • 5.1.1Self-addressed questions
      • 5.1.2Known and unknown answers
    • 5.2The contribution of vajon
    • 5.3Accounting for the distribution of vajon
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 June 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jul.00016.far
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