Gyuris Beáta (NYTI)

Talán 'Perhaps'

2020. december 17., 11.00

The aim of the paper is to propose a unified account of the denotation of talán ’perhaps’ in Hungarian, which appears in declaratives and interrogatives encoding assertions and questions. It is suggested for the first time that talán is not only an inferential evidential, but it also makes reference to the (immediate) Question Under Discussion in the discourse, which can be reconstructed on the basis of the information structure of the declarative or interrogative it appears in. The account explains certain interpretational effects of talán, including the lack of the ’interrogative flip’ or the obligatory rhetorical question readings of interrogatives without constituent focus.