Experimental Studies on Stress and Scope in Hungarian  

Gyuris Beáta  

The talk presents the results of three recent perception experiments, conducted in cooperation with Scott Jackson (U. of Maryland), and their consequences. The aim of the experiments was to test whether the observations first made by Hunyadi (1981) on the scope of postverbal stressed universal quantifiers in Hungarian are confirmed by native speakers, and, provided that they are, for which quantificational expressions they hold additionally. Several theoretical syntactic studies have taken Hunyadi's observations to be valid, and have proposed extending them to various classes of quantifiers. The talk will consider the predictions of some of these theories, like that of É. Kiss (1987, 1992, 2002), Hunyadi (1996, 2002), Surányi (2002), Bródy and Szabolcsi (2003), É. Kiss (2010) and Olsvay (2011), and tries to assess them on the basis of how well they are confirmed by the new experimental data. We will also reflect on methodological issues related to testing scope.