DOI: 10.5507/ff.14.24440606.13

Exhaustivity in Focus: Experimental Evidence from Hungarian

Mátyás Gerőcs, Anna Babarczy, and Balázs Surányi

This study presents the results of two experiments investigating the nature of exhaustivity of pre-verbal focus in Hungarian, both doing so in an indirect way. Experiment 1 contrasts the responses given in long versus short time windows in a truth-value judgment task. Experiment 2 makes the task itself indirect and compares pre-verbal focus with three other types of focus in the same language. Through these multiple comparisons we provide evidence that exhaustivity in pre-verbal focus is not entailed, unlike exhaustivity in clefts, with which it has been treated as being on a par. Instead, it is due to pragmatic implicature, in particular, conventional implicature.

pages: 181-194



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