Polarity particles in Hungarian
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Donka F. Farkas
Abstract
This paper proposes an account of the distribution and role of a set of particles in Hungarian dubbed `polarity particles’, which include igen `yes’, nem `no’, and de `but’. These particles occur at the leftmost edge of a class of assertions uttered as reactions to an immediately preceding assertion or polar question. It is argued that they express two sets of features typical of the class of reactive assertions they occur in, one set encoding the polarity of the asserted sentence, and the other encoding the relation of the asserted sentence to the immediately preceding utterance. The discussion is set against an explicit approach to context structure and to assertive and polar questioning speech acts that draws on a number of pre-existing proposals in the literature.
Abstract
This paper proposes an account of the distribution and role of a set of particles in Hungarian dubbed `polarity particles’, which include igen `yes’, nem `no’, and de `but’. These particles occur at the leftmost edge of a class of assertions uttered as reactions to an immediately preceding assertion or polar question. It is argued that they express two sets of features typical of the class of reactive assertions they occur in, one set encoding the polarity of the asserted sentence, and the other encoding the relation of the asserted sentence to the immediately preceding utterance. The discussion is set against an explicit approach to context structure and to assertive and polar questioning speech acts that draws on a number of pre-existing proposals in the literature.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword vii
- Hungarian v 1
- Eliminating factivity from syntax 29
- Negative quantifiers in Hungarian 65
- Polarity particles in Hungarian 95
- Experimental evidence for recursion in prosody 119
- Trochaic proper government, loose CV, and vowel ~ zero alternation in Hungarian 143
- Ablative causes in Hungarian 167
- Morphology or phonology? 197
- Adpositional preverbs, chain reduction and phases 217
- Overt nominative subjects in infinitival complements in Hungarian 251
- Name index 277
- Subject index 279
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword vii
- Hungarian v 1
- Eliminating factivity from syntax 29
- Negative quantifiers in Hungarian 65
- Polarity particles in Hungarian 95
- Experimental evidence for recursion in prosody 119
- Trochaic proper government, loose CV, and vowel ~ zero alternation in Hungarian 143
- Ablative causes in Hungarian 167
- Morphology or phonology? 197
- Adpositional preverbs, chain reduction and phases 217
- Overt nominative subjects in infinitival complements in Hungarian 251
- Name index 277
- Subject index 279
