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Part of
Particles in German, English, and Beyond
Edited by Remus Gergel, Ingo Reich and Augustin Speyer
[Studies in Language Companion Series 224] 2022
► pp. 355–380

Chapter 13
Evidentiality and the QUD

A study of talán ‘perhaps’ in Hungarian declaratives and interrogatives

| 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.

Keywords: conjectural evidential, epistemic modal, interrogative flip, question under discussion, rhetorical question
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Talán in falling declaratives
    • 2.1Previous literature on talán: Epistemic possibility and inference
    • 2.2Declaratives with talán in context
    • 2.3Towards a formal account
  • 3.Talán and questions in Hungarian: Background
    • 3.1Previous work on talán in questions
    • 3.2Forms encoding question acts in Hungarian
  • 4.Talán in ∧-declaratives
  • 5.Talán in ∧-interrogatives
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 August 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.224.13gyu
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