Abstract
This paper aims to reveal the entire system of profiles of pronominal distribution (PPD) in sentence-internal back-referencing to singular entities in Hungarian. In this language the following three types of pronoun are in competition: the distal demonstrative pronoun az ‘that’, the third person personal pronoun ő ‘(s)he’, and a pronoun which can be regarded as the weak variant of the latter. Although the basic division of labor among the three forms is that the demonstrative pronoun refers to an entity with a [–HUMAN] feature and the two versions of the personal pronoun to a [+HUMAN] entity, the opposite ways of back-referencing are not excluded either (Pléh and Radics, Általános Nyelvészeti Tanulmányok XI:261–277, 1976; Pléh, Hungarian linguistics. Linguistic and literary studies in Eastern Europe 4. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1982; Kenesei, The syntactic structure of Hungarian. Syntax and semantics 27. Academic Press, San Diego-New York, 1994:329). We discuss the following factors deciding PPD with respect to acceptability in complex-sentence-internal back-referencing: (i) the oblique versus non-oblique case marking of the pronoun, (ii) the [±HUMAN] character of the antecedent, (iii–iv) the information structural function of the antecedent and that of the pronoun (including topics, foci, also-quantifiers and postverbal non-operators), and (v) the specificity of the antecedent. It will be demonstrated that quantifiers behave radically differently from the other three information-structural functions. An exact rule system exhaustively deciding the PPD’s will also be provided.
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Notes
- 1.
The six-degree scale of grammaticality judgments is as follows: *: unacceptable, *?: relatively acceptable compared to *; ??: intermediate or unclear status; ?: marked: not completely unacceptable or disfavored form; (?): slightly marked, but probably acceptable.
- 2.
The definitions of the +O and the –O profiles of human triplets in points ii and iii are defined with reference to overlapping lower and upper two thirds of the [0, 50] interval because certain triplets strike as operatorlike on the basis of two of its members. This overlap, however, does not result in such an unwanted possibility that a triplet should be qualified as showing sensitivity to both operatorness and its opposite anti-operatorness, exactly due to the reference to the two members just mentioned.
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Appendix
Appendix
Profiles of pronominal distribution, partly on the basis of data presented by Farkas and Alberti (2018, subsection 1.1.1.3.5): grammaticality judgments and their quantified evaluations, visualized by shades in proportion with weighted averages of the quantified evaluations:
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Alberti, G., Farkas, J. (2018). The Case of Competing Back-Referencing Pronoun Variants with Information Structural Functions in Hungarian. 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_17
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