Focused Topics in Hungarian: Reconsidering the Pragmatic Relevance of the Structural Focus Position1

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper, a specific syntactic construction of Hungarian is investigated in which the preverbal constituent filling the structural Focus position functions as the topic of the sentence on the pragmatic level. Focused topic constructions are commonly used in Hungarian, especially in copular sentences. The core motivation of their use is the following: the placement of the topic into Focus position gives rise to the implicature that the topic referent is the only referent the predicate of the sentence holds for. This complex topicalization strategy can be accounted for by means of an alternative‐based concept of focus in the spirit of Rooth (1992), É. Kiss (1998) and Krifka (2008): the focusing of the aboutness topic indicates the presence of potential alternatives, and the referent of the topical expression placed into the structural Focus position functions as an exhaustive topic.