Apparent or Real? On the Complementary Distribution of Identificational Focus and the Verbal Particle

Chapter 2 of this book has argued that in the Hungarian sentence, the primary locus of the marking of event type (or, in a different terminology, the primary locus of the marking of situation aspect) is the immediately preverbal slot, identified as Spec,PredP. This is the canonical position of resultative and terminative particles marking accomplishments and achievements, and this is the canonical position of locative particles marking predicates of existence or spatial configuration in a given location. Interestingly, the immediately preverbal position is also the position of identificational focus. The question this chapter aims to answer is if the complementary distribution of the focus and the verbal particle in preverbal position is apparent or real, and – whether it proves to be apparent or real – what brings about the parallel properties of particle-initial and focus-initial projections.