Summary
We have argued here that focused constituents in Hungarian must occur as sisters of S or VP and that the word order peculiarities of sentences containing focused constituents must be accounted for independently of the position of these constituents. Section 3 presented an account of sentences containing focused constituents in the GPSG framework. The theoretical implication of the above discussion is that Hungarian focusing does not provide evidence for the existence of ‘downgrading movement’. Since no other evidence for such movement has been given in the literature so far, we can conclude that the generalization requiring the filler to dominate its gap is valid. The GPSG treatment of unbounded dependencies is superior to the GB treatment with respect to this generalization since the non-existence of downgrading movement follows from the former theory but not from the latter.
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I wish to thank the participants of the Linguistics Club at Pennsylvania State University, three anonymous referees, the editors of NLLT, F. Ackerman, and especially Gerald Gazdar for valuable comments on previous versions of this paper.
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Farkas, D.F. On the syntactic position of focus in Hungarian. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 4, 77–96 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00136265
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00136265