Boundaries Crossed, at the Interfaces of Morphosyntax, Phonology, Pragmatics and Semantics by Huba Bartos Marcel den Dikken Zoltán Bánréti & Tamás Váradi

Author:Huba Bartos, Marcel den Dikken, Zoltán Bánréti & Tamás Váradi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

2 Towards Unifying the Two Meanings of Ugye: Informal Analysis

The rest of the paper will show that the contemporary interpretation of ugye can be formalized in such a way that, on the one hand, it reflects the historical developments, and, on the other hand, it considers the contributions of the two prosodic variants as similar as possible.

We propose that ugye~ came about as a result of a five-stage development. First, ugye started out as a final tag, with a transparent morphology, attached to a declarative. In the course of describing its contribution, we will most closely follow the suggestions by Krifka (2017: 388) regarding the interpretation of tag questions in English. He assumes that these constructions express, on the one hand, the speaker’s commitment to the propositional content φ of the declarative, and, on the other hand, that there are two possible continuations of the discourse after the tag question has been uttered. In one of them, φ becomes part of the CG, and in the other one, the addressee commits himself to ¬φ. Note that the contribution of the declarative clause component, described above, differs from the contribution of root declaratives that are used to make ordinary assertions, which express two commitments. The first is the commitment by the speaker to stand behind the proposition φ, encoded by the declarative clause syntax, and the second is the commitment that the asserted proposition φ should become part of the common ground, encoded by the prosody (the nuclear stress H*) (p. 371).9 Based on these ideas, we will assume that questions with ugye express that the speaker is committed to φ, and ask the addressee whether he is committed to φ or ¬φ.

In the second stage of its development, ugye lost its morphological transparency, and the fact that it was used to encode a question was marked by the fall-rise melody. Note that postulating this change is necessary in order to explain the current distribution of ugye in forms that are used to make question acts, following the assumptions made in Gyuris (2017) on interpretational differences between polar interrogatives marked by the -e particle and those marked by the final rise-fall melody in Hungarian. According to these, the particle -e is only compatible with contexts where the truth of neither of the possible answers follows on the basis of evidence that recently became available to the interlocutors, whereas the forms with the rise-fall melody are also acceptable if the available evidence indicates the truth of the positive answer (i.e. the answer with the same propositional content as the interrogative). The fact that question acts made with a sentence containing ugye/\ are compatible with situations where the evidence alone forces the positive answer to be true supports this claim. The syntactic configuration characteristic of stage two is the same as the one illustrated in the contemporary example (1) above, repeated in (9), 10:

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