Doctoral Consortium

In my paper I discuss possible interpretations of Hungarian sentences containing multiple prosodic foci and ‘only’. Hungarian as a discourse-configurational language has a special position for identificational/exhaustive focus, which makes the role of ‘only’ problematic. Next to this problem I focus on sentences with multiple foci with and without ‘only’ and discuss the possible interpretations: complex focus meaning (Krifka, 1991) and the scope-reading, where one focused constituent takes scope over the other one. The main aim of my paper is to report the first observations of an ongoing research on the semantics and pragmatics of focus and ‘only’ in Hungarian. Consequently, I will not present a fully worked out theory, but rather a problem set with proposals for possible solutions. I will point out two main problems with the interpretation of ‘only’ and focus in Hungarian. The first question is the interpretation of ‘only’ that goes along with exhaustive focus. Hungarian has a special structural position for (identificational) focus which is obligatorly pre-verbal, and the elements in this position get exhaustive interpretations. Hungarian ‘only’ (csak) always goes along with this identificational/exhaustive focus, which suggests that ‘only’ (csak) is not responsible for the exhaustive meaning. The second problem also concerns the function of ‘only’. In the case of multiple focus, it is possible that two arguments are prosodically focused, modified by ‘only’ and the sentence has a complex focus (Krifka, 1991) interpretation (see (1)). (1) Csak only Zephirt Zephir.acc h́ıvta called fel VM csak only Celeste. Celeste ‘It is the Zephir, Celeste pair of whom the first was called by the second.’ In my paper I will discuss these problems, however, I will focus on example (1), since it seems to be very challenging for the semantic and syntactic analysis as well. 1 Focus and ‘only’ in Hungarian Hungarian is a discourse-configurational language where the syntactic structure of a sentence is driven by discourse-semantic considerations (É. Kiss, 1995).