Home General Interest Chapter 6. On a continuum from categorical to thetic judgment
Chapter
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Chapter 6. On a continuum from categorical to thetic judgment

Indefinite subjects and locatives in Hungarian and French
  • Zsuzsanna Gécseg and Laure Sarda
View more publications by John Benjamins Publishing Company
To Publisher Page
Existential Constructions across Languages
This chapter is in the book Existential Constructions across Languages

Abstract

This paper addresses the relationships between the existential reading of sentences with an indefinite subject and the presence of a spatial anchoring constituent. We investigated a corpus of French sentences with indefinite subjects in preverbal position and their translation into Hungarian. While French has a rather rigid word order, Hungarian is a discourse configurational language which signals the informational status of sentence constituents. Through the prism of differentiations made in the Hungarian translation, we distinguished two groups of indefinite subject sentences, one having a thetic interpretation, the other retaining a categorical – or categorical-like – interpretation despite the indefinite form of the subject. These sentences illustrate the fact that while indefinite NPs are known to be bad topics, they can nevertheless play this role to various degrees.

Abstract

This paper addresses the relationships between the existential reading of sentences with an indefinite subject and the presence of a spatial anchoring constituent. We investigated a corpus of French sentences with indefinite subjects in preverbal position and their translation into Hungarian. While French has a rather rigid word order, Hungarian is a discourse configurational language which signals the informational status of sentence constituents. Through the prism of differentiations made in the Hungarian translation, we distinguished two groups of indefinite subject sentences, one having a thetic interpretation, the other retaining a categorical – or categorical-like – interpretation despite the indefinite form of the subject. These sentences illustrate the fact that while indefinite NPs are known to be bad topics, they can nevertheless play this role to various degrees.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Funding vii
  4. Contributors ix
  5. Chapter 1. Existential constructions 1
  6. Part I. Existence and related constructions
  7. Chapter 2. Existential predication and have-possessive constructions in the languages of the world 34
  8. Chapter 3. Impersonal existence in the weather domain 68
  9. Part II. Existence and information structure
  10. Chapter 4. Pure existentials vs. pure presentationals 102
  11. Chapter 5. Presentational clefts, existentials and information structure 139
  12. Chapter 6. On a continuum from categorical to thetic judgment 180
  13. Part III. Existence and quantification
  14. Chapter 7. The Finnish existential clause 220
  15. Chapter 8. Partition and existence 245
  16. Part IV. Existence and negation
  17. Chapter 9. Is the French verb manquer ‘lack, miss’ a negative existential predicate? 284
  18. Chapter 10. ‘To be’ and its negation in Latvian 301
  19. Chapter 11. Words also exist in a world 325
  20. Index 347
  21. Language index 352
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.76.06gec

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Funding vii
  4. Contributors ix
  5. Chapter 1. Existential constructions 1
  6. Part I. Existence and related constructions
  7. Chapter 2. Existential predication and have-possessive constructions in the languages of the world 34
  8. Chapter 3. Impersonal existence in the weather domain 68
  9. Part II. Existence and information structure
  10. Chapter 4. Pure existentials vs. pure presentationals 102
  11. Chapter 5. Presentational clefts, existentials and information structure 139
  12. Chapter 6. On a continuum from categorical to thetic judgment 180
  13. Part III. Existence and quantification
  14. Chapter 7. The Finnish existential clause 220
  15. Chapter 8. Partition and existence 245
  16. Part IV. Existence and negation
  17. Chapter 9. Is the French verb manquer ‘lack, miss’ a negative existential predicate? 284
  18. Chapter 10. ‘To be’ and its negation in Latvian 301
  19. Chapter 11. Words also exist in a world 325
  20. Index 347
  21. Language index 352
Sign up now to receive a 20% welcome discount
Institutional Access
How does access work?
Have an idea on how to improve our website?
Please write us.
© 2026 De Gruyter Brill
Downloaded on 21.2.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1075/hcp.76.06gec/html
Scroll to top button