EXPLAINING THE WORD ORDER OF INCLUSIVE AND EXCLUSIVE EXPRESSIONS

• Authors: E-Kiss Katalin
• Languages of publication: HU

Abstracts

EN

The paper aims to account for the fact that negative adverbials of manner, degree, and frequency (the so-called exclusive expressions) are obligatorily focussed, unlike their positive counterparts (the so-called inclusive phrases). The behaviour of inclusive and exclusive adverbials is understood on the basis of the behaviour of noun phrases containing a numeral modifier. It is shown that an expression like '3 children' can mean '3 or more children' in every sentence position except the focus slot. This well-known semantic property of numeral quantifiers holds for the whole class of scalar modifiers. That is, if n is a scalar element, it can be understood as 'n or more'; hence a sentence involving n remains true also if the value of n is replaced by a higher value (e.g. the sentence 'I have read five books' remains true also if I have actually read ten books). It is argued that in the case of scalar elements in the negative domain of a bidirectional scale, the replacement of the value of n with a higher value may result in a semantic anomaly (thus in the case of 'I have read few books' the value of 'few' cannot be replaced with the value of 'many'). The replacement of the value of a scalar element with a higher value can be prevented by the focussing of the scalar element, given that focussing involves the exclusion of all alternatives but the one named by the focussed phrase. This is why exclusive adverbials, also representing scalar expressions, must be focussed.

Keywords

EN

EXCLUSIVE EXPRESSION; INCLUSIVE EXPRESSION; WORD ORDER

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Society of Hungarian Linguistics
• Journal: Magyar Nyelv (Hungarian Language)
• Year: 2006
• Volume: 102
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 442-459
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

E-Kiss Katalin

• Katalin E-Kiss, for postal address contact the journal editor; www.c3.hu/~magyarnyelv/

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

10HUAAAA071428