•  188
    This paper highlights a small selection of cases where crosslinguistic insights have been important to big questions in the theory of semantics and the syntax/semantics interface. The selection includes (i) the role and representation of Speaker and Addressee in the grammar; (ii) mismatches between form and interpretation motivating high-placed silent operators for functional elements; and (iii) the explanation of semantic universals, including universals pertaining to inventories, in terms of l…Read more
  •  143
    Exemplification with disjunction
    Általános Nyelvészeti Tanulmányok XXXII: 321-329 32. 2020.
    (English translation of ...) This paper points out naturally-occurring examples, primarily in Hungarian but also to a more limited extent in English, in which disjunction (i) has a conjunctive force but (ii) its use highlights that the list is not intended to be exhaustive. The preliminary analysis is in terms of recursive proposition strengthening by exhaustification without a scalar alternative, assimilating exemplifications to known cases of conjunctively interpreted disjunctions in other lan…Read more
  •  11
    According to the classical description of obviation, the subject of a subjunctive is disjoint in reference from the attitude-holder subject of the immediately higher clause. Inspired by Ruwet (1984/1991) and Farkas (1988; 1992), I present data from Hungarian where obviation in certain subjunctives is plainly lifted, and data where obviation occurs in indicatives. I argue that obviation is not the result of competition with another construction, and point to promising potential accounts in terms …Read more
  •  149
    Subordination: Articles and Complementizers
    In Approaches to Hungarian Vol. 4. pp. 123-139. 1992.
  •  545
    Functional categories in the noun phrase
    In Istvan Kenesei (ed.), Approaches to Hungarian, Vol. 2, Jate. pp. 167-190. 1987.
    With reference to Hungarian, the paper argues that DP is analogous to CP. The D head *a(z)* is an analog of the complementizer C. It enables its complement to act as an argument. Definiteness is anchored in a feature lower in the structure.
  •  312
    Unconditionals and free choice unified
    Semantics and Linguistic Theory 29. 2019.
    Rawlins (2013: 160) observes that both unconditionals and more classical free choice can be meta-characterized using orthogonality, but does not actually unify the two. One reason may be that in English, different expressions serve in these roles. By contrast, in Hungarian, AKÁR expressions serve as NPIs, FCIs, and unconditional adjuncts, but not as interrogatives or free relatives. This paper offers a unified account of the Hungarian data, extending Chierchia 2013 and Dayal 2013. The account p…Read more
  •  746
    Conjunction Meets Negation: A Study in Cross‐linguistic Variation
    with Bill Haddican
    Journal of Semantics 21 (3): 219-249. 2004.
    The central topic of this inquiry is a cross-linguistic contrast in the interaction of conjunction and negation. In Hungarian (Russian, Serbian, Italian, Japanese), in contrast to English (German), negated definite conjunctions are naturally and exclusively interpreted as `neither’. It is proposed that Hungarian-type languages conjunctions simply replicate the behavior of plurals, their closest semantic relatives. More puzzling is why English-type languages present a different range of interpret…Read more
  •  548
    Additive presuppositions are derived through activating focus alternatives
    Proceedings of the 2017 Amsterdam Colloquium. 2017.
    The additive presupposition of particles like "too"/"even" is uncontested, but usually stipulated. This paper proposes to derive it based on two properties. (i) "too"/"even" is cross-linguistically focus-sensitive, and (ii) in many languages, "too"/"even" builds negative polarity items and free-choice items as well, often in concert with other particles. (i) is the source of its existential presupposition, and (ii) offers clues regarding how additivity comes about. (i)-(ii) together demand a spa…Read more
  •  641
    Surányi (2006) observed that Hungarian has a hybrid (strict + non-strict) negative concord system. This paper proposes a uniform analysis of that system within the general framework of Zeijlstra (2004, 2008) and, especially, Chierchia (2013), with the following new ingredients. Sentential negation NEM is the same full negation in the presence of both strict and non-strict concord items. Preverbal SENKI `n-one’ type negative concord items occupy the specifier position of either NEM `not' or SEM `…Read more
  •  625
    Semantics plays a role in grammar in at least three guises. (A) Linguists seek to account for speakers‘ knowledge of what linguistic expressions mean. This goal is typically achieved by assigning a model theoretic interpretation in a compositional fashion. For example, *No whale flies* is true if and only if the intersection of the sets of whales and fliers is empty in the model. (B) Linguists seek to account for the ability of speakers to make various inferences based on semantic knowledge. For…Read more
  •  37
    Variation, distributivity, and the illusion of branching
    with Filippo Beghelli and Dorit Ben-Shalom
    In Anna Szabolcsi (ed.), Ways of Scope Taking, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 29--69. 1997.
    We show in rather informal terms how witness sets can be useful in both explicating some basic intuitions about scope and understanding how particular denotational semantic differences between noun phrases affect their abilities to bear out certain scopal patterns. More generally we suggest that the usual notion of scope needs to be factored into variation distributivity and maximality. This part lays some groundwork for several of the subsequent chapters and is thus of interest to all readers.…Read more
  •  865
    Hungarian disjunctions and positive polarity
    In Istvan Kenesei & Peter Siptar (eds.), Approaches to Hungarian, Vol. 8, Univ. of Szeged. 2002.
    The de Morgan laws characterize how negation, conjunction, and disjunction interact with each other. They are fundamental in any semantics that bases itself on the propositional calculus/Boolean algebra. This paper is primarily concerned with the second law. In English, its validity is easy to demonstrate using linguistic examples. Consider the following: (3) Why is it so cold in here? We didn’t close the door or the window. The second sentence is ambiguous. It may mean that I suppose we did not…Read more
  •  344
    The effect of negative polarity items on inference verification
    with Lewis Bott and Brian McElree
    Journal of Semantics 25 (4): 411-450. 2008.
    The scalar approach to negative polarity item (NPI) licensing assumes that NPIs are allowable in contexts in which the introduction of the NPI leads to proposition strengthening (e.g., Kadmon & Landman 1993, Krifka 1995, Lahiri 1997, Chierchia 2006). A straightforward processing prediction from such a theory is that NPI’s facilitate inference verification from sets to subsets. Three experiments are reported that test this proposal. In each experiment, participants evaluated whether inferences fr…Read more
  •  566
    Overt Scope in Hungarian
    with Michael Brody
    Syntax 6 (1). 2003.
    The focus of this paper is the syntax of inverse scope in Hungarian, a language that largely disambiguates quantifier scope at spell-out. Inverse scope is attributed to alternate orderings of potentially large chunks of structure, but with appeal to base-generation, as opposed to nonfeature-driven movement as in Kayne 1998. The proposal is developed within mirror theory and conforms to the assumption that structures are antisymmetrical. The paper also develops a matching notion of scope in terms…Read more
  •  1156
    Binding On the Fly: Cross-Sentential Anaphora in Variable— Free Semantics
    In R. Oehrle & J. Kruijff (eds.), Resource Sensitivity, Binding, and Anaphora, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 215--227. 2003.
    Combinatory logic (Curry and Feys 1958) is a “variable-free” alternative to the lambda calculus. The two have the same expressive power but build their expressions differently. “Variable-free” semantics is, more precisely, “free of variable binding”: it has no operation like abstraction that turns a free variable into a bound one; it uses combinators—operations on functions—instead. For the general linguistic motivation of this approach, see the works of Steedman, Szabolcsi, and Jacobson, among …Read more
  •  762
    Standard theories of scope are semantically blind. They employ a single logico-syntactic rule of scope assignment quantifying in Quantifier Raising, storage, or type change etc which roughly speaking prefixes an expression \aplha
  •  1824
    Comparative superlatives
    In N. Fukui, T. Rapoport & E. Sagey (eds.), Anna Szabolcsi 1986 MIT WPL 8, Mit Press. 1986.
    I will make the following two main claims: (4) a. Under syntactically specifiable conditions superlatives take sentential scope. b. Sentential scope superlatives are necessarily indefinite.
  •  333
    Clips mostly from Wikipedia, assembled by A. Szabolcsi in 2007. Selection based on lectures by Professor Zsigmond Telegdi at ELTE, Budpest, in the 1970s.
  •  566
    Quantifiers in pair-list readings
    In Ways of Scope Taking, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 311--347. 1997.
    Section 1 provides a brief summary of the pair-list literature singling out some points that are particularly relevant for the coming discussion. -/- Section 2 shows that the dilemma of quantification versus domain restriction arises only in extensional complement interrogatives. In matrix questions and in intensional complements only universals support pairlist readings, whence the simplest domain restriction treatment suffices. Related data including conjunction, disjunction, and cumulative r…Read more
  •  651
    [...] I will only investigate [Austin's] claims as challenges to present-day model theoretic semantics. My main point will be to draw a sharp line between the semantic and pragmatic aspects of performatives and thereby discover a gap in Austin’s treatment. This will in my view naturally lead to the proposal in Section 2, that is, to treating performatives as denoting changes in intensional models. The rest of Section 2 will be concerned with the status of felicity conditions and a tentative ext…Read more
  •  326
    Optionality, scope, and licensing: An application of partially ordered categories
    with Raffaella Bernardi
    Journal of Logic, Language and Information 17 (3): 237-283. 2008.
    This paper uses a partially ordered set of syntactic categories to accommodate optionality and licensing in natural language syntax. A complex but well-studied data set pertaining to the syntax of quantifier scope and negative polarity licensing in Hungarian is used to illustrate the proposal. The presentation is geared towards both linguists and logicians. The paper highlights that the main ideas can be implemented in different grammar formalisms, and discusses in detail an implementation where…Read more
  •  42
    The paper compares theories of how the intervention of quantifiers, negation, and focus block the relation between wh-expressions and their traces, with special reference to Szabolcsi & Zwarts 1993/1997, Honcoop 1998, and Beck 2006. It presents new cross-linguistic data that bear on Beck's focus intervention theory.
  •  418
    Presuppositional TOO, Postsuppositional TOO
    with Adrian Brasoveanu
    The Dynamic, Inquisitive, and Visionary Life of Φ, ?Φ, and ◊Φ Subtitle: A Festschrift for Jeroen Groenendijk, Martin Stokhof, and Frank Veltman. 2013.
    One of the insights of dynamic semantics in its various guises (Kamp 1981, Heim 1982, Groenendijk & Stokhof 1991, Kamp & Reyle 1993 among many others) is that interpretation is sensitive to left-to-right order. Is order sensitivity, particularly the default left-to-right order of evaluation, a property of particular meanings of certain lexical items (e.g., dynamically interpreted conjunction) or is it a more general feature of meaning composition? If it is a more general feature of meaning compo…Read more
  •  951
    Positive polarity - negative polarity
    Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 22 (2). 2004.
    Positive polarity items (PPIs) are generally thought to have the boring property that they cannot scope below negation. The starting point of the paper is the observation that their distribution is significantly more complex; specifically, someone/something-type PPIs share properties with negative polarity items (NPIs). First, these PPIs are disallowed in the same environments that license yet type NPIs; second, adding any NPI-licenser rescues the illegitimate constellation. This leads to the co…Read more
  •  291
    Compositionality in Focus
    Folia Linguistica Europea 15 141-162. 1982.
    I believe that the validity of [the Fregean principle of compositionality] is beyond doubt and thus any grammar, whether organized to reflect [it] directly or not, may ultimately be required to satisfy it. One of the systems that are precisely designed to reflect [it] is Montague Grammar, where, technical details aside, it is realized as follows: (2) a. Sentences are composed by putting their constituents together step by step, with no subsequent rearrangement; b. Not only each lexical item but …Read more
  •  2477
    The Noun Phrase
    In Ferenc Kiefer & Katalin E. Kiss (eds.), The Syntactic Structure of Hungarian, Academic Press. 1994.
    This chapter makes the following main claims about Hungarian: A. There is a detailed parallelism between the structures of noun phrases (DPs) and clauses (CPs), involving inflection, possessor extraction, and articles as complementizers. B. "HAVE sentences" are existential sentences involving possessor extraction. C. The argument frame of complex event nominals is identical to that of the underlying verb. D. The deverbal affix in nominals may have either a plain verb or a complex verb in its sco…Read more
  •  422
    Compositionality without word boundaries: (the) more and (the) most
    Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 22. 2012.
    This paper seeks to illustrate the advantages of not treating phonological words as distinguished building blocks in compositional semantics. Following Bobaljik 2012, we derive the relative readings of amount superlatives in two steps, [[[d-many] comparative] superlative]. The existence of two comparative constructions is revealed, involving more vs. the more. Each builds a different superlative construction, explaining the conflicting intuitions about superlatives in the literature, as well as …Read more