On the interpretation of negative polar interrogatives in Hungarian

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Published: Dec 15, 2016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14232/jeny.2016.1.8
Keywords:
polar interrogative, outside negation, inside negation, bias

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Beáta Gyuris
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Institute of Linguistics

Abstract

The aim of the paper is the study of issues related to the interpretation of Hungarian negative polar interrogatives. After considering the basic syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of polar interrogatives with canonical and non-canonical structures, we argue that the distinction between „outside” and „inside” negation readings proposed by Ladd (1981) for English also exists in Hungarian and can be detected with the help of certain morphosyntactic tests. We show that polar interrogatives with a rise-fall intonation have both „outside” and „inside” negation readings, but interrogatives containing the particle -e only possess the former one. We call attention to certain further interpretational contrasts between the two types of structure and review some ways of giving the data a theoretically based explanation.

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How to Cite
[1]
Gyuris, B. 2016. On the interpretation of negative polar interrogatives in Hungarian. Jelentés és Nyelvhasználat. 3, 1 (Dec. 2016), 169–190. DOI:https://doi.org/10.14232/jeny.2016.1.8.
Issue
Vol. 3 No. 1 (2016)
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Article
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Beáta Gyuris, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Institute of Linguistics

Beáta Gyuris is a senior researcher at the Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She works on topics in formal semantics and pragmatics, such as information structure, quantifier scope, prosody, pragmatic markers and the relations between sentence types and the speech acts expressed by them. She published a monograph entitled The Semantics of the Contrastive Topic in Hungarian, and co-authored a textbook on formal semantics.

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