Sometimes it's hard to be Coherent
Abstract
Proceedings of LFG03; CSLI Publications On-line
The paper provides an analysis of the construction in Hungarian known
as "focus raising", illustrated below.
| János-t | mond-t-am | hogy | jön |
| John-ACC | say-PAST-1.SG | that | come.3.SG |
`It is John that I said is coming.'
In focus raising, the focus of the matrix clause is identified with a
grammatical function in the embedded clause. Focus raising is
particularly interesting because of the case marking on focus-raised
subjects. Rather than having nominative case (unmarked), they appear
suffixed by the accusative marker, -t, as shown in the example. This
fact is analyzed in the paper as follows.
- Accusative NPs such as Jánost in the example function as objects;
this is evidenced by verb-object definiteness agreement, and the
possibility of a reflexive pronoun in the same position.
- On the other hand, the object function is argued not to be
thematic (i.e., semantically selected by the matrix predicate),
based on its ability to be realized as an expletive pronoun, and
the long-distance nature of focus raising.
A pattern of variation among Hungarian speakers observed by Gervain
(2002) shows that this athematic object function may host either
functional or anaphoric binders for the embedded clause subject.
Anaphoric binding from an athematic position leads to a violation of
the semantic Coherence condition (Dalrymple 2001, p. 243), but this
condition still appears to apply in other cases. Therefore, an
Optimality-Theoretic treatment is proposed, in which the semantic
Coherence condition is a violable constraint.
References
Dalrymple, Mary (2001). Lexical Functional Grammar. Academic Press.
Gervain, Judit (2002). Linguistic methodology and microvariation in
language: the case of operator-raising in Hungarian. Ms. University
of Szeged, Hungary.