Research Aims

The research wishes to contribute to the current intensive international discussion on the formal and interpretational properties of interrogatives and other form types that are used for the expression of question acts, by undertaking a systematic study of these constructions in Hungarian, and proposing cross-linguistically relevant generalizations about them. The work has four main objectives. i) It wishes to systematically collect a large amount of data from actual dialogues and categorize them in terms of parameters that have been advocated in the current formal literature.ii) It wishes to test the generalizations obtained by the means above on the use of form types, intonation, and pragmatic markers with the help of perception experiments. iii) It aims to integrate the findings into formal theories of dialogue. iv) We plan to work on the typological underpinnings and general theoretical foundations of our analysis of Hungarian, by looking at the form and interpretation of selected analogous phenomena in other languages.