Abstract
The paper attempts to develop a unified approach to the conventional discourse effects of the Hungarian particle ugye as it occurs in assertions and question acts and presents a formal, dynamic semantic analysis of its contribution. It offers a sketch of a possible historical development from a tag-type use to a sentence internal use, through separation of the contribution of intonation from the contribution of the lexical meaning of ugye. The uniform contribution of ugye to assertions and questions in the synchronic stage is taken to be a contextual presupposition. It is proposed that ugye requires a prior commitment to the semantic content φ of the sentence containing the particle on the part of the counterpart of the default perspective center of the speech act. In the case of an assertion it is the addressee who is argued to have a commitment to φ, which results in the “as you know” interpretation of ugye. In the case of questions it is the speaker who is presupposed to be committed to φ, which provides the biased question interpretation of sentences containing ugye pronounced with rise-fall intonation.
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Notes
- 1.
I wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers of the paper for their valuable comments and suggestions, and Marcel den Dikken for editorial advice. Research for the paper was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (under the Institutional Partnership Program) and the National Research, Development and Innovation Office—NKFIH, under project no. K 115922.
- 2.
In Hungarian, the third person singular form of the verb is used instead of the second person singular form if the subject refers to the addressee and the speaker wishes to address this person formally (i.e., using of the ‘V-form’).
- 3.
Hungarian National Corpus (http://corpus.nytud.hu/mnsz/index_eng.html, Oravecz et al. 2014).
- 4.
- 5.
Alternatively, sentence-final ugye, preceded by an intonational break, can also be pronounced with a falling tone (H*L-L%). The function of the latter is to ask for confirmation rather than for agreement, and thus seems to have a function analogous to that of ‘falling tag interrogative’ in English (cf. Farkas and Roelofsen 2017). This falling questioning ugye, which cannot be integrated into the structure of the sentence, will not be discussed further in this paper.
- 6.
It was Péteri (2002) who first noted the similarities between ugye~ and ja referred to above.
- 7.
The source of Molnár’s (2016) data is the BUSZI-2 database (http://buszi.nytud.hu).
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
Hungarian National Corpus (http://corpus.nytud.hu/mnsz/index_eng.html, Oravecz et al. 2014).
- 11.
- 12.
In Malamud and Stephenson’s (2015: 291) words, “when using an RP-tag, a speaker is not directly committing to p, but is indicating that if p is confirmed, she will share responsibility for it”.
- 13.
In case we were to adopt Farkas and Roelofsen’s (2017) approach for the analysis of ugye/\, the question would arise whether we should consider it similar to rising tags and attribute to it a ‘credence’ level between moderate to high, or similar to falling tags, and attribute to it a high ‘credence’ level, given that the Hungarian construction is available both for asking for confirmation and for asking for acknowledgement.
- 14.
For a discussion of the process of semantic reanalysis, cf. Eckardt (2006).
- 15.
I thank one of the anonymous reviewers of the paper for asking for clarification in this matter. I believe, however that the solution proposed by the reviewer herself/himself, according to which the use of ugye “requires the Speaker to have some evidence (private or public) that the Addressee will go along with her commitment” is too weak, since it would predict that Addressee’s agreement depends on how successfully Speaker can convince him that she has evidence (not shared by Addressee) for the truth of φ. For example, although in the situation illustrated in (13), the husband seems to have every reason to go along with the speaker’s commitment (assuming that she has just spoke to a person who has first-hand information about the birth of the child), the use of ugye is still infelicitous.
- 16.
Cf. Krifka (2001) on the properties of ‘paired acts’ consisting of initiating and responding acts.
- 17.
I thank one of the anonymous reviewers of the paper for raising these important concerns.
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Gyuris, B. (2018). Ugye in Hungarian: Towards a Unified Analysis. In: Bartos, H., den Dikken, M., Bánréti, Z., Váradi, T. (eds) Boundaries Crossed, at the Interfaces of Morphosyntax, Phonology, Pragmatics and Semantics. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 94. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90710-9_13
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