The Hungarian Operator Raising Revisited

The Hungarian construction type traditionally referred to as Operator Raising (OR, see É. Kiss 2002, Gervain 2004, Coppock 2003) is a configuration in which a constituent bearing some grammatical function semantically belongs to a subordinate clause but surfaces in the matrix sentence. The examples in (1) show various constituents involved in OR: for instance in (1a) and (1a') the subordinate subject is "raised" (and, as these examples demonstrate, the case of the raised constituent may be either accusative or nominative), (1b) exemplifies a "raised" oblique. Objects may also be "raised" as in (1c). (1c') shows that with raised objects, the main verb may either have definite or indefinite conjugation

Coppock (2003) gives an LFG account of the phenomena. She claims that the fronted element may be an athematic object of the main verb and the identification with the lower grammatical function could be either anaphoric or functional in nature. Anaphoric control must be allowed since if the raised element bears accusative case, it is a subject in the embedded clause and includes a quantified element, then the lower verb can either have 3rd person singular or 3rd plural agreement (this was first reported by Gervain 2002):

Since the athematic object with anaphoric identification leads to the violation of Semantic Coherence Condition (Dalrymple 2001), Coppock (2003) claims that this condition is just violable OT-style constraint.

I have two goals. First, I aim to argue that there is no need for the demotion of Semantic Coherence. I claim that the fronted element is a thematic argument of the main verb, so (2) (and 1a, 1c') is an instance of prolepsis, and akin to structures attested for instance in Madurese (Davies 2005) or Greek (Kotzoglou & Papangeli 2008). I summon arguments from the empirically tested availability of resumptive pronouns (3), idiom distribution (4), island-insensitivity (5) and from the fact that the verbs which allow OR may not be bridge verbs (6 is a canonical raising construction). Such behaviour is typical of prolepsis, as is argued by Davies (2005).

My second goal is to present some empirical data about OR and to show that discourse-structure (King & Zaenen 2004, Gazdik 2011) may provide a useful tool for describing some experimental results. I will argue that empirical data shows that in the all the shown sentences except for 1a', the discourse function of the fronted constituent may be either focus or contrastive topic, but focus is preferred. I seek to explain this by claiming that informants disprefer contrastive topic because the corresponding discourse structure would be larger than with one focus, as contrastive topic involves "splitting up the original question into implicit subquestions and answer (some of) them" (Gazdik 2011:169, quoting Büring 2003). So if the fronted element is focus in 1a it may correspond to discourse-tree like figure 1, if the fronted elememt is contrastive topic, it may correspond to a discourse tree like figure 2. Such discourse trees may be neatly formalized in LFG, as is proven by Gazdik (2011).

So it could be inferred that the LFG principle Economy of Expression could be interpreted at the d-structure level as well. This is in line with various Optimality-theoretic approaches which penalize large structures (see for example Bresnan 1998).

Interestingly, in 1a' the preferred discourse function is contrastive topic and not focus. I assume that it is because that in 1a' the "raised" element is subject (unlike in the other sentences) and the subject function is prototypically associated with topics (see eg. Gregory & Michaelis 2001, Lambrecht 1994). Speaking in Optimality-theoretic terms, this constraint outranks the previously mentioned principle about small discourse trees.

References

• Bresnan, J. (1998). Morphology Competes with Syntax: Explaining Typological Variation in Weak Crossover Effects. In Barbosa, P, Fox, D., Hagstrom, P., McGinnis M., Pesetsky, D. (Eds.), Is the Best Good Enough? Optimality and Competition in Syntax (59-92). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT.
• Büring, D. (2003). On d-trees, beans, and b-accents. Linguistics & Philosophy, 26(5):511-545.
• Coppock, E. (2003). Sometimes it's hard to be coherent. In Butt, M., King, T.H. (eds), Proceedings of the LFG03 Conference (126-143). CSLI Publications.
• Dalrymple, M. (2001). Lexical-Functional grammar. San Diego: Academic Press.
• Davies, W. D. (2005). Madurese Prolepsis and Its Implications for a Typology of Raising. Language 81:645-665.
• É. Kiss, K. (2002). The Syntax of Hungarian. Cambridge University Press.
• Gazdik, A. (2011). Multiple Questions in French and Hungarian. (Doctoral dissertation.)
• Gervain, J. (2002). Linguistic methodology and microvariation in language: The case of operator-raising in Hungarian. MA Thesis, University of Szeged.
• Gervain, J. (2004). The Syntax and Semantics of the Resumptive Dependency in Hungarian Focus-raising Constructions. ZAS Papers in Linguistics. 2004, 35, 1: 111-131.
• Gregory, M. L., Michaelis, L.A. (2001). Topicalization and Left-Dislocation: A Functional Opposition Revisited. Journal of Pragmatics 33: 1665-1706.
• King, T.H., Zaenen, A. (2004). F-structures, information structure, and discourse structure. Proceedings of LFG04, extended abstract. http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/LFG/9/lfg04kingzaenen-abs.html
• Kotzoglou, G., Papangeli, D. (2008). Not really ECM, not exactly control: the quasi-ECM construction in Greek. In Davies W.D, Dubinsky S. (Eds.), New Horizons in the Analysis of Control and Raising (111-131). Springer.
• Lambrecht, K. (1994). Information structure and sentence form: Topic, focus, and the mental representations of discourse referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.