Quantificational contrastive topics with verum/falsum focus

Abstract

The paper investigates a problem related to the distribution of quantity-indicating determiners as contrastive topics in Hungarian sentences containing a verum/falsum focus. It is argued that the reason why certain sentences with the above structure turn out to be ill-formed is that their intended truth-conditional interpretations are in contradiction with the presuppositions introduced by the contrastive topic. Although this strategy is essentially the same as that proposed by Büring (2003), it is shown that the well- or ill-formedness of the relevant Hungarian examples does not follow without extra assumptions from the way Büring defines the presuppositions of contrastive topics, and therefore an alternative definition is put forth.