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Item Open Access Stress test for relative clauses(2009) Riester, ArndtA brief overview on the semantic differences between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses is given. Subsequently differences with regard to information status and focus alternatives are presented. I investigate, in a systematic way, which focus (accent) patterns on relative-clause constructions are (im)possible in which contexts and why this is so. In order to account for the infelicity of certain restrictive relative clause constructions a new proposal is made how to derive the contrastive properties of complex definite descriptions (focus phrases) involving relative clauses. The account presented in this paper gives rise to predictions on intonational phonology and sentence processing.Item Open Access Exhaustiveness of Hungarian focus : experimental evidence from Hungarian and German(2009) Onea, EdgarPreverbal focus in Hungarian has been argued to be more exhaustive or exhaustive in a distinguished way as compared to what has been generally called prosodic focus in languages like English or German. In virtually all analysis it has been assumed that the reason for this property of Hungarian focus is related to its immediately preverbal syntactic position. This effect has thus been derived compositionally at the syntax-semantics interface as part of the truth conditional content of the respective sentences. In this paper I present new data from a pilot experiment that suggests that exhaustiveness is not part of the truth conditional content of sentences containing preverbal focus in Hungarian. The data also shows, however, that Hungarian focus is indeed somewhat more exhaustive than prosodic focus in German. Hence there is definitely something to say about exhaustiveness in Hungarian. Finally I present a new empirical puzzle emerging from the experimental data.Item Open Access Focus, sensitivity, and the currency of the question(2009) Sæbø, Kjell JohanAccording to Beaver and Clark (2008), a closed class of items, primarily particles like even or only, are systematically sensitive to focus, encoding a dependency on the Current Question (the CQ). This theory appears to give wrong predictions for exclusive particles like only in some cases where intuitively, what the particle associates with is not the (only) constituent in focus, – something else can be in focus instead or as well, even it itself. I conclude that while both focus itself and exclusive particles always address a Question, they do not always address the same.Item Open Access Towards a DRT-based account of adversative connectors(2009) Karagjosova, ElenaThe paper presents an exploratory DRT-based account of the adversative connector doch. It is assumed that doch is weakly ambiguous between various relations of contrast, and an underspecified meaning is defined in the framework of UDRT Reyle et al. (2005). It is shown how in concrete discourse, a particular reading is selected from the underspecified meaning representation, depending on the information structure of the sentence, as well as on the syntactic and prosodic properties of the respective doch-use. This process is modelled in the framework of the most recent version of DRT Kamp et al. (2005) and the version of DRT that takes into consideration the focus-background division of the sentence Kamp (2004).Item Open Access Variation in focus(2009) Wedgwood, DanielThis paper takes a broad view on the notion of focus. It calls into question the idea that focus is a unitary, cross-linguistically applicable notion and also questions the implicit metatheoretical reasoning that apparently leads linguists of various schools to posit such a thing. A comparison of the Hungarian ‘focus position’ with the English it-cleft provides a case study of how even considerable similarity of form and function may spring from independent origins. This is accompanied by brief demonstrations of more blatant diversity in ‘focusing’ phenomena.Item Open Access "Only" as a Mirative Particle(2009) Zeevat, HenkThe concept of mirativity was introduced in typology by DeLancey (1997) for certain "tenses". DeLancey refers to earlier traditions in "Balkan Linguistics". Malchukov (2003) uses it in a typological overview of constrastive markers for the origin of certain contrastive markers. A mirative marker indicates that whatever it marks is surprising.Item Open Access Pe-marking and referential persistence in Romanian(2009) Chiriacescu, Sofiana; Heusinger, Klaus vonThe fact that in Romanian a direct object is sometimes morphologically marked by the particle pe and sometimes not is a long attested phenomenon. Diverse studies on Differential Object Marking (DOM) explained most occurrences of pe as a case marker by means of the features animacy, definiteness, and specificity. The only cases left unexplained are those in which a direct object realized as an unmodified definite or indefinite nominal phrase are optionally marked, whereby the difference in meaning between the two alternative constructions is subtle though significant. Post-verbal indefinite human direct objects are optionally pe-marked. Based on a synchronic study, we will show that besides specificity, discourse prominence also influences the case-marking of indefinite direct objects. Case marked indefinite direct objects show the property of “referential persistence”, i.e. a direct object introduced by an indefinite pe-marked nominal phrase will be more often taken up in the subsequent discourse than its unmarked counterpart. In conclusion, we will add another feature to the local parameters triggering DOM another feature, namely discourse prominence.Item Open Access Deriving the Properties of Structural Focus(2009) Kiss, Katalin É.This paper proposes a theory of structural focus derived via focus movement which can account for all the focus-related facts attested in Hungarian, among them facts which other current theories cannot explain. It will claim that focus movement serves the purpose of creating a predicate–subject structure, in which the focus-moved constituent functions as a specificational predicate. The properties of both the focus and the background follow from the independently established properties of specificational predication constructions.