A study of talán ‘perhaps’ in Hungarian declaratives and interrogatives
Beáta Gyuris | Hungarian Research Centre | Eötvös Loránd University
The aim of the paper is to sketch a unified account of the denotation of talán ‘perhaps’
in Hungarian, which appears in declaratives and polar interrogatives encoding assertions and questions. It is suggested for
the first time that talán is not only an inferential or conjectural evidential, but also makes reference to
the current question under discussion. The account explains some interpretational effects of talán, including
the absence of the “interrogative flip” or the obligatory rhetorical question readings of polar interrogatives without
constituent focus, which are discussed here for the first time.
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