Lilla Pintér
Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
The acquisition of the exhaustive interpretation of Hungarian focus constructions
Research question
The aim of the study is to investigate whether experimental data support the view that
sentences containing the focus particle csak ‘only’, sentences with structural focus, and
sentences with neutral intonation and word order express different – asserted, presupposed,
and accidental-pragmatic – kinds of exhaustivity.
Background
The exhaustivity of a focus bound by the particle csak ’only’ is claimed to be asserted (see
Szabolcsi 1994), therefore it is reasonable to predict that also young children have access to it.
However, recent experiments on the development of the interpretation of only in English
(Paterson et al. 2003, 2005) suggested that preschoolers interpret sentences with and without
focus particles as having the same meaning.
According to the standard view, Hungarian structural focus is an example of the focus type
called identificational focus by É. Kiss (1998), and its exhaustivity is considered to be a
presupposition (Kenesei 1986, Szabolcsi 1994, Bende-Farkas 2009). This assumption was
first questioned by Wedgwood (2005), in whose analysis exhaustive interpretation is a
pragmatic implicature in the case of structural focus and prosodic focus alike. The latter view
was experimentally supported by Onea & Beaver (2011), Kas & Lukács (2013), but for
methodologycal problems to be discussed in my talk, their results are inconclusive. Based on
adults’ responses, Gerőcs, Babarczy & Surányi (2014) also emphasized the function of the
context, and proposed that the exhaustivity of structural focus is a conventional implicature.
Experiments
I conducted a sentence–picture verification task in which every test sentence had the same
structure (in Experiment 1 they all contained the focus particle csak (1); in Experiment 2 they
contained structural focus (2); and in Experiment 3 there were neutral SVO sentences (3)),
and it was the type of the picture that was varied. There were four conditions (i–iv) differing
in the type of pictures, each of them containing 8 sentence–picture pairs.
(i) exhaustive condition: (ii) non-exhaustive cond.:
Experiment 1. (sentences with csak ‘only’)
(1) Csak a nyuszi emelte fel a zászlót.
only the rabbit raised up the flag-ACC
‘It is only the rabbit who has raised the flag.’
Experiment 2. (sentences with structural focus)
(2) A NYUSZI emelte fel a zászlót.
the rabbit
raised up the flag-ACC
‘It is the rabbit who has raised the flag.’
(iii) (i) with a distractor: (iv) false condition:
Experiment 3. (neutral SVO sentences)
(3) A nyuszi fel-emelte a zászlót.
the rabbit up-raised
the flag-ACC
‘The rabbit has raised the flag.’
Conditions (i) and (iv) represented the baseline, and conditions (ii) and (iii) were the critical
conditions. The first of the critical conditions (ii) intended to measure the interpretation of
exhaustivity, whereas the second one (iii) could show which constituent participants associate
the exhaustive reading with.
In addition to the 32 test items, there were also 4 familiarization items and 24 filler items.
Participants had to judge each item by using a three-point scale in which the scores from 1 to
3 were represented by a sad, a straight and a happy smiley face.
Lilla Pintér
Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Results
***
3
***
3
***
***
3
***
2,5
2,5
2,5
2
2
2
Preschoolers
Adults
1,5
1,5
1,5
1
1
exhaustive
condition
non-exhaustive
condition
Experiment 1
(csak ’only’)
***: p < 0.001
1
exhaustive
condition
non-exhaustive
condition
exhaustive
condition
Experiment 2
(structural focus)
non-exhaustive
condition
Experiment 3
(neutral SVO)
Mean acceptance ratings in Experiment 1–3
In Experiment 1, I have not found any effect in the critical non-exhaustive condition between
the group of preschoolers (n=15, mean age: 5;9) and adults (n=15, mean age: 37;5).
However, in the non-exhaustive condition of Experiment 2, there was a significant difference
between the group of preschoolers (n=25, mean age: 6;4) and adults (n=15, mean age: 42;7):
the mean scores of preschoolers (2.49) and adults (2.05) differed significantly according to
Welch's Two Sample t-test, t(37.92)= -5.03, p < .001.
In Experiment 3, the mean scores of the non-exhaustive condition did not differ significantly
between the group of preschoolers (n=15, mean age: 6;4) and adults (n=15, mean age: 22;10).
Conclusion
The results of the three experiments show that there is indeed a remarkable difference
between the exhaustive interpretation of csak ‘only’ and structural focus: in non-exhaustive
contexts both preschoolers and adult native speakers completely rejected sentences containing
csak, as opposed to this, in Experiment 2 they mostly choose the middle option, indicating
that structural focus constructions are not entirely correct but also not absolutely incorrect
there. These findings are in line with the assumption of Kenesei (1986), Szabolcsi (1994) and
Bende-Farkas (2009), according to which exhaustivity is asserted in the case of csak, but
presupposed in the case of structural focus. Sentences with neutral intonation and word order
were mostly accepted in the non-exhaustive condition of Experiment 3, which proves that
native speakers do not interpret these constructions exhaustively when there are no contextual
cues to trigger the generation of an implicature.
The fact that preschoolers were significantly less sensitive to the exhaustivity of structural
focus than adults could also indicate that exhaustivity encoded by a lexical item is easier for
children to process than exhaustivity encoded by a specific syntactic configuration.
References
Bende-Farkas, Á. 2009. Adverbs of quantification, it-clefts and Hungarian focus. In: Katalin É. Kiss (ed.), Adverbs and adverbial adjuncts at
the interfaces. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 317–348.
É. Kiss, K. 1998. Identificational Focus versus Information Focus. Language 74: 245–273.
Gerőcs, M., Babarczy, A. & Surányi, B. 2014. Exhaustivity in Focus: Experimental Evidence from Hungarian. In Joseph Emonds & Markéta
Janebová (eds.), Language Use and Linguistic Structure. Olomouc: Palacky University. 181–194.
Kas, B. & Lukács, Á. 2013. Focus sensitivity in Hungarian adults and children. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 60(2): 217–245.
Kenesei, I. 1986. On the logic of Hungarian word order. In: Werner Abraham & Sjaak de Meij (eds.), Topic, Focus, Configurationality.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 143–159.
Onea, E. & Beaver, D. 2011. Hungarian Focus Is Not Exhausted. In Satoshi Ito Cormany & David Lutz (eds.), Proceedings of the 19th
Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference. Ithaca: Cornell University. 342–359.
Paterson, K. B., Liversedge, S. P., Rowland, C. & Filik, R. 2003. Children’s comprehension of sentences with focus particles. Cognition 89:
263–294.
Paterson, K. B., Liversedge, S. P., White, D., Filik, R. & Jaz, K. 2005. Children’s interpretation of ambiguous focus in sentences with ’only’.
Language Acquisition 13(3): 253–284.
Szabolcsi, A. 1994. All quantifiers are not equal: The case of focus. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 42: 171–187.
Wedgwood, D. 2005. Shifting the Focus. From Static Structures to the Dynamics of Interpretation. Amsterdam: Elsevier.