Scope marking and prosody in Hungarian

The paper presents an analysis of the results of three perception experiments that aimed to investigate the scope of postverbal quantifiers in Hungarian. These experiments found no correlations between wide vs. narrow scope readings of postverbal quantifiers and their stressed vs. unstressed pronunc...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inGlossa (London) Vol. 3; no. 1
Main Authors Gyuris, Beáta, Jackson, Scott R.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Open Library of Humanities 02.08.2018
Subjects
Hungarian
perception experiment
prosody
quantifier scope
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Summary:The paper presents an analysis of the results of three perception experiments that aimed to investigate the scope of postverbal quantifiers in Hungarian. These experiments found no correlations between wide vs. narrow scope readings of postverbal quantifiers and their stressed vs. unstressed pronunciations, contradicting a widespread assumption. In addition to the dominance of scope interpretation that corresponds to the linear order of constituents, previously unnoticed effects of the syntactic or thematic role of the postverbal quantifier and of the type of preverbal operator in the same sentence were found. These might indicate a more complex interaction of several factors or point to a greater role of extra-grammatical effects in determining the scope of quantifiers in Hungarian than previously assumed. The paper also addresses methodological issues that arise in the course of eliciting scope judgments experimentally.
ISSN:2397-1835
2397-1835
DOI:10.5334/gjgl.311