Variation in focus

This paper takes a broad view on the notion of focus. It calls into question the idea that focus is a unitary, cross-linguistically applicable notion and also questions the implicit metatheoretical reasoning that apparently leads linguists of various schools to posit such a thing. A comparison of the Hungarian ‘focus position’ with the English it-cleft provides a case study of how even considerable similarity of form and function may spring from independent origins. This is accompanied by brief demonstrations of more blatant diversity in ‘focusing’ phenomena

Predication and Information Structure: A Dynamic Account of Hungarian Pre-verbal Syntax

Hungarian 'focus position' is typically thought of as a central example of a 'discourse configurational' phenomenon, since it not only involves the expression of information-structural (or 'discourse semantic') meaning through the manipulation of word order but also interacts syntactically with other elements of the sentence. In this thesis, I argue that this kind of phenomenon highlights fundamental theoretical problems with conventional assumptions about the relationships between linguistic form and different kinds of meaning and demonstrate that these problems have led to empirical inadequacies in the syntactic analysis of Hungarian. I propose an alternative analysis that makes use of a dynamic, incremental parsing-based approach to grammar, which in turn allows for the influence of inferential pragmatic operations (investigated in terms of Relevance Theory) at all stages in the process of interpreting linguistic form. This opens up possibilities of structural and interpretive underspecification that allow for the interpretation of the 'focus position' to be unified with the information-structural interpretation of sentences that do not contain a syntactically focused expression. This analysis explains the interaction of syntactic foci with other pre-verbal items. The burden of explanation is thus shifted away from specialised, abstract syntactic representations and onto independently necessary aspects of cognitive organisation. The use of 'discourse semantic' primitives---whether in terms of focus or exhaustivity---to encode the effects of the 'focus position' is shown to be both theoretically problematic and empirically inadequate. The information-structural meanings associated with the position must be viewed not as the input to interpretive processes but instead as the result of inferential processes performed in context. Reanalysis of the syntactic evidence shows the relevant position to be not merely pre-verbal, but underlyingly pre-tense, showing that the unmarked position of the main verb is essentially the same as that of syntactically focused expressions. This leads to an analysis whereby both 'neutral', topic-comment readings and cases of narrow focus emerge from inferences over a common interpretive procedure. This procedure is identified as 'main predication': the point in the parsing of a sentence at which the application of a single predicate effects the conversion of a mere description of an event into a truth-conditional assertion. Main predication is represented using neo-Davidsonian, event-based semantics (the effect of the main predicate being equivalent to that of the application of an existential quantifier over an event variable in the neo-Davidsonian approach) and made dynamic by the use of the epsilon calculus. This analysis predicts the postposing of any (otherwise pre-tense) 'verbal modifier' (VM) in the presence of a syntactic focus and the apparent information-structural ambiguity of VMs when they are pre-tense. Certain constraints on the distribution of quantifiers are also predicted, one such constraint being adequately characterisable only within a semantically underspecified, procedural account. The behaviour of the negative particle "nem" is also given a maximally simple explanation. The apparently variable scope of the negative operator is explicable without ad hoc syntactic mechanisms: the apparent wide scope reading associated with 'sentential' negation follows inferentially from narrow scope negation of temporal information. The syntactic positions of negation are predictable on this basis. In addition, the assumption of consistent narrow scope negation correctly predicts that VMs must postpose or receive a narrow focus reading in the presence of "nem"

Should I believe the truth?

Many philosophers hold that a general norm of truth governs the attitude of believing. In a recent and influential discussion, Krister Bykvist and Anandi Hattiangadi raise a number of serious objections to this view. In this paper, I concede that Bykvist and Hattiangadi’s criticisms might be effective against the formulation of the norm of truth that they consider, but suggest that an alternative is available. After outlining that alternative, I argue that it is not vulnerable to objections parallel to those Bykvist and Hattiangadi advance, although it might initially appear to be. In closing, I consider what bearing the preceding discussion has on important questions concerning the natures of believing and of truth

Varieties of post-civil war violence

Quantitative research on the “durability” of peace following civil wars typically captures the breakdown or survival of “peace” in a binary manner, equating it with the presence or absence of civil war recurrence. In the datasets that underpin such studies, years that do not experience full-scale civil war are implicitly coded as “peaceful.” Yet, post-civil war environments may remain free from war recurrence, while nevertheless experiencing endemic violent crime, state repression, low-intensity political violence, and systematic violence against marginalized groups, all of which are incongruent with the concept of peace. Approaches to assessing post-civil war outcomes which focus exclusively on civil war recurrence risk overestimating the “durability” of peace, implicitly designating as “peaceful” a range of environments which may be anything but. In this article, we discuss the heterogeneity of violent post-civil war outcomes and develop a typology of “varieties of post-civil war violence.” Our typology contributes to the study of post-civil war peace durability, by serving as the basis for an alternative, categorical conceptualization of “peace years” in conflict datasets

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

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