ABSTRACT

Bilinguals have been shown to differ from monolinguals especially in the realization and interpretation of phenomena that operate at the syntax/discourse interface. Hungarian has a well-known interface structure—identificational focus—which has been widely studied in the theoretical literature but never with bilinguals. The present article fills that gap, using three acceptability judgment experiments to test the realization and interpretation of identificational focus by heritage speakers and L1-dominant native speakers of Hungarian. The results reveal that both groups pattern similarly, showing some vulnerability at the syntax/discourse interface with regard to focus interpretation but less so with its realization. Further, the findings bear on the description of Hungarian focus in the theoretical literature, providing experimental evidence that focus is realized preverbally and that its interpretation is the result of a pragmatic implicature rather than part of the sentence’s semantics.

摘要

双语者已被证明与单语者有所不同，尤其是在语法/话语界面上运作的现象的实现和解释上。匈牙利语具有众所周知的界面结构（确定性焦点），该结构已在理论文献中进行了广泛研究，但从未使用过双语者。本文填补了这一空白，使用三个可接受性判断实验来测试匈牙利语的母语使用者和母语为L1的母语使用者对识别焦点的实现和解释。结果表明，两组的模式相似，在语法/语篇界面上显示了焦点解释方面的一些漏洞，但在实现方面则较弱。此外，这些发现还涉及理论文献中对匈牙利语的关注，