The acquisition of asserted, presupposed, and pragmatically implied exhaustivity in Hungarian

Pintér, Lilla (2018) The acquisition of asserted, presupposed, and pragmatically implied exhaustivity in Hungarian. Acta Linguistica Academica, 65 (2-3). pp. 353-383. ISSN 2559-8201

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Abstract

The paper reports on three experiments in which the exhaustive interpretation of sentences containing the focus particle csak ‘only’, structural focus constructions, and sentences with neutral intonation and word order were investigated. The results obtained not only reveal the developmental trajectory of the adult-like comprehension of each sentence type, but also contribute to the discussion concerning the semantic or pragmatic nature of their exhaustive meaning component. As the three construction types were judged in different ways on a three-point scale, the findings appear to support the hypothesis according to which exhaustivity is part of the asserted content of sentences with csak ‘only’, it is context-independently presupposed in the case of structural focus, and in certain contexts it can arise as an implicature in the case of neutral utterances, as well.

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