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- Author or Editor: Gábor Alberti x
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For all types of derivation characterised as productive by Kiefer (2000), the original version of Model Tau (Alberti 1997), dealing only with verbal derivation coming with no category change, can be extended to the entire spectrum of derivations; moreover, it can be extended in a straightforward way: the single novel factor is the central case frame peculiar to particular word categories. For instance, if the predicator is a noun, what corresponds to the case frame <Nom, Acc≯ in the sphere of verbs, is the case frame <Nom, Poss≯; this mapping is immediately observable in the case of -ÓjA (Laczkó 2005a), a suffix forming nouns in an argument-structure retaining way (elcsábít 'seduce' -≯ elcsábítója '(someone's) seducer'). The case frame characteristic of the output word category supplies an upper limit, within which the actual realization can belong to five types that precisely coincide with the five basic types of category-preserving verbal (and participial) derivation discussed Alberti (1997). How can these five basic types be derived? The crucial factor of each argument-structure transition is "advancement" of an argument (parallel with the "degradation" of another argument) in a sense that can be precisely defined in Model Tau.
We follow Pollard (2007) in assuming that the mainstream Kripke/Montagueinspired possible-worlds semantics is “a framework known to have dubious foundations” (primarily because of the granularity problem), and “worlds are constructed from propositions […], and not the other way around”. We intend to work out this approach in a DRT-based framework, called ReALIS, in order to account for phenomena concerning referent accessibility, at the same time. We claim that our system offers a general solution to problems of intensional identity, and it is devoid of DRT’s “extra level” problem—by embedding discourse representations in the world model, not directly but as parts of the representations of interpreters’ minds, i.e., their (permanently changing) information states/“internal worlds”. Hence, there is simply no intensionality in ReALIS as interpreters’ “worldlets” (in description of their brains within the entire model of the universe) carry all kinds of information (BDI, guesswork, dream) typically “entrusted to” possible worlds.
Abstract
Our point of departure is László Kálmán's system of radical anti-mainstream argumentations about such central but dubious, or at least debated, constituents and concepts of dynamic semantics as discourse representation, information state, compositionality between semantics and syntax, bridging, deferred information, and ambiguity/vagueness. We strive for pointing out that Kálmán's observations and stances concerning these fundamental, ultimate problems of pragmasemantics are worth relying upon the formal theory that is to realize the desirable purpose of creating a version of formal pragmasemantics simultaneously capable of meeting the criteria and requirements appearing in different non-logics-based/informal areas of the description of human communication and – what is behind it – thinking.
The paper discusses two subtypes of a special kind of Hungarian deverbal nominalization, “HATNÉK-nominalization”, whose derivational suffix -hAtnék coincides with a sequence of the following three verbal suffixes: (i) the permissive modal suffix -hAt ‘can’, (ii) the conditional suffix -né-, and (iii) a number-person suffix -k. Within the system of Hungarian deverbal nominalizations, a very high degree of verbalness is typical of both HATNÉK-noun subtypes, of which we attribute a Giusti-style split-DP structure to the basic type, while the other, special, subtype is argued to have an exceptional structure with an “unboundedly expandable” (Spec,NP) position, capable of hosting huge verbal “inclusions”.
Abstract
The paper presents the interpretation and explanation of the findings of two pieces of experimental research within the framework of Varga's (2016) pitch-tier model of the Hungarian declarative sentence. One of the experiments was established to investigate the information-structural contribution of quantified expressions (such as mindhárom barátom ‘all three of my friends’ and Csaba is ‘Csaba also’). The other experiment explored the acoustic features of the spontaneous-speech specific discourse marker hát ‘well/so’. The two topics can be regarded as interconnected if Varga's model is interpreted in the strong sense that pitch – presumably in a more or less strong correlation with intensity – is responsible for indicating the topic–comment dichotomy and other factors of the discourse-embedding of sentences. Thus, the reconciliation of our data with Varga's model requires the consideration of the pitch-tier substructures in their complex dynamism. The experiments support the plausible hypothesis that the variants of the discourse marker hát as part of the preparatory contour primarily differ in duration, while is-quantifiers in different pitch-tier parts differ in terms of pitch values.
