On the Information Structure of the Hungarian Sentence

Abstract

Traditionally, information structure in Hungarian has always been considered to be identical to topic-comment structure, which has been defined partly in syntactico-semantic and partly in pragmatic terms. The present paper argues in favor of the postulation of two independent levels, one defined in terms of logical subject and logical predicate, the other in terms of topic and comment. The paper is going to show that a number of phenomena which pose problems for the traditional account can easily be explained on the two-level approach.