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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. 127–153

The semantics of ejsze in the Székely dialect of Hungarian

| Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics | Eötvös Loránd University
This paper provides the first formal account of the meaning of the pragmatic marker ejsze in the Székely (Szekler) dialect of Hungarian. Using standard diagnostics of sentence types, we argue that it is compatible with declaratives and constituent interrogatives but not with polar interogatives. We suggest that it makes a contribution analogous to that of German wohl in declaratives, and argue that its use-conditional meaning can be described along the lines proposed for wohl by Eckardt (2020). Accordingly, ejsze is analyzed as an inferential evidential, marking that the prejacent is defeasibly entailed by the maximal body of knowledge of the speaker. The paper discusses contrasts between the distribution and felicity of ejsze vs. wohl, and ejsze vs. talán, an inferential particle that appears both in the standard and in the Székely dialect.
Keywords: pragmatic marker, use condition, inferential evidential, sentence type, speech act
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and previous work
  • 2. Ejsze: form and functions
    • 2.1Position in declaratives
    • 2.2Compatibility with different sentence types
    • 2.3 Ejsze only contributes to the use conditions
    • 2.4Informal observations on certain uses of ejsze
  • 3.Towards formalizing the interpretation of ejsze
    • 3.1Proposal
    • 3.2Extensions
    • 3.3Comparing ejsze and talán ‘perhaps’
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 19 June 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jul.00017.gyu
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