Abstract Hungarian Temporal and Aspectual Reference in the Absence of Dedicated Markers Nicole Marie Palffy-Muhoray 2016 in Rece
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Abstract Hungarian Temporal and Aspectual Reference in the Absence of Dedicated Markers Nicole Marie Palffy-Muhoray 2016 In recent years, work has emerged suggesting that a wide range of languages lack paradigms of overt, fully grammaticalized morphemes to express tense and aspect distinctions. This dissertation asks how a language without such dedicated morphology might express these meanings by exploring the following two strategies for expressing tense/aspect distinctions in Hungarian. No systematic marking of grammatical/viewpoint aspect categories (e.g. Progressive, Imperfective) exists in Hungarian. These semantic distinctions are instead retrieved through the interaction of several factors, including facts about the discourse context, properties of the predicate, word order, and the presence/absence of verbal particles and temporal frame expressions. Éppen, which I argue is best analyzed as a discourse particle in the tradition of Beaver & Clark(2008), is used to specify aspectual distinctions in a variety of aspectually ambiguous contexts, and gives rise to a separate but related range of precisifying effects when it occurs with scalar expressions. I propose that éppen presupposes the existence of a unique strongest alternative to the current question, and asserts that the prejacent be construed as that alternative, thereby picking out the strongest reading from a set of possible alternatives. This analysis provides a first sketch of a heretofore undocumented strategy for expressing aspectual distinctions, and allows for a unified account of seemingly diverse distributions and interpretations. The only overt, grammaticalized marker of tense in Hungarian is the Past morpheme (-t). Future reference is expressed either with the null/unmarked Non-past tense or with fog, which I argue is a modal verb. Analyses of English future-referring strategies (e.g. ‘will’, ‘be going to’, Present, Present Progressive) that are proposed to be cross-linguistic fall short for Hungarian, suggesting that there is greater diversity in how languages express future reference cross-linguistically than previously thought. I suggest that the facts can be explained based on interactions of context, properties of the predicate, and the semantics of the Non-past and fog. If fog has a metaphysical modal base, which forces fog’s obligatorily future reference, we can account for a distribution in which fog is preferred for expressing future reference in some contexts and the Non-past is preferred in others by appealing to pragmatic blocking relationships and speaker preferences familiar from the domains of scalar implicatures and indirect speech acts. The Hungarian facts suggest that languages can succeed at expressing nuanced temporal information with relatively few dedicated markers. This analysis allows for these complex distributional differences between future-referring expressions to be accounted for with a fairly rudimentary semantics if properties of the context of utterance are sufficiently spelled out. This project provides novel insights into the understudied topic of the semantics of tense and aspect in Hungarian, and contributes to the growing understanding of the range of strategies available to express tense and aspect cross-linguistically. I suggest that at least for Hungarian, the role of context is crucial for the specification of temporal and aspectual reference. Hungarian Temporal and Aspectual Reference in the Absence of Dedicated Markers A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Yale University in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Nicole Marie Palffy-Muhoray Dissertation Director: Ashwini Deo May 2016 ©2016 by Nicole Marie Palffy-Muhoray All rights reserved. ii Contents Abstract i Table of Contents iii List of Tables vi List of Figures vii Glossary and font conventions viii Acknowledgements ix Dedication xii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Goals..................................................1 1.2 Roadmap...............................................2 1.3 Data and Methodology.......................................3 1.4 Basic semantic assumptions.....................................3 2 Hungarian: basic facts and theory5 2.1 Introduction..............................................5 2.2 Basics.................................................5 2.3 Tense..................................................8 2.3.1 Semantics of tense.....................................8 2.3.2 Hungarian: Past and Non-past...............................9 2.4 Aspect................................................. 12 2.4.1 Grammatical aspect..................................... 12 2.4.2 Lexical aspect........................................ 14 2.4.3 Perfectivity, telicity, and verbal particles......................... 15 2.5 Auxiliary verbs............................................ 19 2.5.1 Fog as an auxiliary..................................... 22 2.6 Modality................................................ 24 2.6.1 Modality........................................... 25 2.6.2 Modal auxiliaries...................................... 26 2.7 Summary............................................... 27 3 Éppen and aspect 28 3.1 Introduction.............................................. 28 iii 3.2 Éppen’s effects in imperfective sentences............................. 31 3.2.1 The pattern.......................................... 31 3.2.2 Additional Notes...................................... 32 3.3 The Semantics............................................ 34 3.3.1 The imperfective operator................................. 34 3.3.2 Motivations......................................... 37 3.3.3 Meaning of éppen...................................... 39 3.4 Statives................................................ 44 3.4.1 Properties of stative sentences............................... 45 3.4.2 Analysis........................................... 46 3.5 Perfective aspect........................................... 47 3.5.1 The perfective operator................................... 49 3.5.2 A puzzle with ‘when’ clauses............................... 50 3.6 Éppen and syntax........................................... 51 3.6.1 Syntactic positions..................................... 51 3.7 Conclusion.............................................. 54 4 Non-aspectual uses of éppen 55 4.1 Introduction.............................................. 55 4.2 Analysis................................................ 57 4.2.1 Set-up............................................ 57 4.2.2 Lexical entry......................................... 57 4.3 Precisification............................................. 58 4.3.1 Precisifiers.......................................... 59 4.3.2 The precision landscape.................................. 60 4.3.3 Temporal frame expressions................................ 61 4.3.4 Measure expressions.................................... 64 4.3.5 Locative expressions.................................... 65 4.3.6 Additional Notes...................................... 67 4.4 The margin effect: a rough sketch................................. 69 4.5 Surprisingness and happenstance.................................. 74 4.6 Conclusion.............................................. 77 5 The semantics of future temporal reference in Hungarian 79 5.1 Introduction.............................................. 79 5.2 Applying literature: what do accounts of English future reference offer for Hungarian?.. 81 5.2.1 Predictions, intentions, and schedules.......................... 81 5.2.2 Futurates and futures.................................... 84 5.2.3 Settledness.......................................... 87 5.3 Semantics............................................... 90 5.3.1 Aspectual operators..................................... 90 5.3.2 The Non-past........................................ 91 5.3.3 Fog.............................................. 92 5.4 Future reference in stative sentences................................ 102 5.4.1 Introduction......................................... 102 5.4.2 A Gricean quantity-based approach............................ 104 5.4.3 A manner approach..................................... 106 iv 5.4.4 A last observation...................................... 108 5.5 Future reference with dynamic predicates............................. 110 5.5.1 Accomplishment predicates................................ 110 5.5.2 Achievement predicates.................................. 113 5.5.3 Activity predicates..................................... 114 5.6 Conclusion.............................................. 115 6 Future reference in speech acts 116 6.1 Introduction.............................................. 116 6.1.1 Recap: the semantics of the Non-past and fog ...................... 117 6.2 Speech acts.............................................. 119 6.2.1 Illocutionary acts...................................... 120 6.2.2 Indirect speech acts..................................... 123 6.3 Immediacy in future-referring speech acts............................ 125 6.3.1 Data.............................................. 127 6.3.2 Analysis........................................... 131 6.4 Puzzles for the future........................................ 140 6.4.1 Commands: fog for disobedient hearers......................... 140 6.4.2 Copley(2009): differences between the simple and progressive present....... 141 6.4.3 No talán ‘maybe’ with fog ................................. 142 6.5 Individual variation........................................