Predication and information structure : a dynamic account of Hungarian pre-verbal syntax

Hungarian focus position is typically thought of as a central example of a dis course con gurational phenomenon since it not only involves the expression of information structural or discourse semantic meaning through the manipulation of word order but also interacts syntactically with other elements of the sentence In this thesis I argue that this kind of phenomenon highlights fundamental theoretical problems with conventional assumptions about the relationships between linguistic form and di erent kinds of meaning and demonstrate that these problems have led to empirical inadequacies in the syntactic analysis of Hungarian I propose an alternative analysis that makes use of a dynamic incremental parsing based approach to grammar which in turn allows for the in uence of inferential pragmatic operations investigated in terms of Relevance Theory at all stages in the process of interpreting linguistic form This opens up possibilities of structural and interpretive underspeci cation that allow for the interpretation of the focus position to be uni ed with the information structural interpretation of sentences that do not contain a syntactically focused expression This analysis explains the interaction of syntactic foci with other pre verbal items The burden of explanation is thus shifted away from specialised abstract syntactic representations and onto independently necessary aspects of cognitive organisation The use of discourse semantic primitives whether in terms of focus or exhaustivity to encode the e ects of the focus position is shown to be both theoretically prob lematic and empirically inadequate The information structural meanings associ ated with the position must be viewed not as the input to interpretive processes but instead as the result of inferential processes performed in context Reanalysis of the syntactic evidence shows the relevant position to be not merely pre verbal but underlyingly pre tense showing that the unmarked position of the main verb is essentially the same as that of syntactically focused expressions This leads to an