Sometimes It’s Hard to Be Coherent

The paper provides an analysis of the construction in Hungarian known as focus raising, illustrated below. János-t mond-t-am hogy jön John-ACC say-PAST-1SG that come.3SG ‘It is John that I said is coming.’ In focus raising, the focus of the matrix clause is identified with a grammatical function in the embedded clause. Focus raising is particularly interesting because of the case marking on focus-raised subjects. Rather than having nominative case (unmarked), they appear suffixed by the accusative marker, -t, as shown in the example. This fact is analyzed in the paper as follows. • Accusative NPs such as Jánost in the example function as objects; this is evidenced by verb-object definiteness agreement, and the possibility of a reflexive pronoun in the same position. • On the other hand, the object function is argued not to be thematic (i.e., semantically selected by the matrix predicate), based on its ability to be realized as an expletive pronoun, and the long-distance nature of focus raising. A pattern of variation among Hungarian speakers observed by Gervain (2002) shows that this athematic object function may host either functional or anaphoric binders for the embedded clause subject. Anaphoric binding from an athematic position leads to a violation of the semantic Coherence condition (Dalrymple 2001, p. 243), but this condition still appears to apply in other cases. Therefore, an Optimality-Theoretic treatment is proposed, in which the semantic Coherence condition is a violable constraint.