Multiple Questions in French and Hungarian: An LFG Account

In this paper we propose an LFG account of multiple questions in French and in Hungarian. It will be argued that (together with clausal coordination) six main types of multiple questions can be identified in the two languages, which can be associated with different readings. Multiple questions in which both question words are in the same clause can be ambiguous between a pair list and a single pair reading, whereas in the case of clausal coordination, which is analyzed as an elliptical structure, only the single pair reading is available. We identify some problems, like that of two preverbal question words in Hungarian, or the ambiguity concerning D-linkedness in French. We then propose an LFG analysis in which information structure is projected at a different level of analysis, containing semantic information as well, and in which the different question words can belong to different sets, TOPIC and FOCUS, respectively.