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The Grammatical Realization of Polarity Contrast: Theoretical, empirical, and typological approaches
Edited by Christine Dimroth and Stefan Sudhoff
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 249] 2018
► pp. 173–202

On two types of polar interrogatives in Hungarian and their interaction with inside and outside negation

| Research Institue for Linguistics, | Hungarian Academy of Sciences

The paper provides a survey of the form types of Hungarian polar interrogatives containing the negative particle nem ‘not’ and of their interpretational features, and discusses the possibilities of formally modeling the observable distinctions. First a general review of the basic syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of polar interrogatives is provided, with special attention to the differences between two root interrogative form types in Hungarian. It is argued that the distinction between outside and inside negation readings proposed by Ladd (1981) for English can also be detected in Hungarian, with the help of particular morphosyntactic tests. The application of the tests reveals that whereas the intonationally marked negative polar interrogatives have both outside and inside negation readings, those marked by morphological means only possess the former one. The tests are also shown to detect interpretational distinctions having to do with the types of bias that the particular forms are compatible with. Without providing a fully-fledged formal modeling, the paper discusses possible strategies for capturing the above distinctions in terms of the proposals made in Romero & Han (2004), Repp (2013) and Krifka (2017).

Keywords: bias, inside negation, outside negation, polar interrogative, Hungarian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The structure of canonical polar interrogatives in Hungarian
  • 3.Interpretational contrasts in positive and negative interrogatives
    • 3.1Inside and outside negation readings of negative polar interrogatives
    • 3.2Bias properties of polar interrogatives
    • 3.3Theoretical accounts of bias in negative polar interrogatives
      • 3.3.1 Romero & Han (2004)
      • 3.3.2 Repp (2013)
      • 3.3.3 Krifka (2017)
  • 4.Inside and outside negation readings of negative polar interrogatives in Hungarian
    • 4.1The two form types and their compatibility with is ‘too’ and sem ‘neither’
      • 4.1.1Data
      • 4.1.2Implications
    • 4.2Negative polar interrogatives containing vala-indefinites
      • 4.2.1Data
      • 4.2.2Implications
    • 4.3Compatibility with positional variants of the adverbs még ‘still’ and már ‘already’
      • 4.3.1Data
      • 4.3.2Implications
    • 4.4Inversion and lack of inversion between verbal prefix and verb
      • 4.4.1Data
      • 4.4.2Implications
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.249.06gyu
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