Speaker: Janos Egressy (UCLA)
Title: Size-sensitive Sequence of Tense in Hungarian
Time: Tuesday, October 7th, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: In Sequence of Tense (SOT) Analyses (e.g. Ogihara 1995), it has been argued that past-under-past configurations (e.g. John said that Mary was pregnant) have a simultaneous reading if the embedded past head undergoes “deletion” under agreement with the matrix past head: While the deletion does not affect the verb form, the reading becomes John said: ‘Mary is pregnant’. If no such deletion happens, the embedded past tense remains backshifted compared to the matrix past tense, so the reading remains John said: ‘Mary was pregnant’. Previous SOT research has claimed that the availability of this deletion rule is a parameter for entire languages, e.g. English has such a rule but Japanese does not, so the simultaneous reading is never available for Japanese clauses. This paper shows that Hungarian exhibits language-internal SOT-variation in past-under-past configurations: While speech-reporting clauses are Japanese-like, i.e. obligatorily backshifted, non-speech-reporting clauses are English-like, i.e. they have a simultaneous reading. My syntactic analysis proposes a size-difference between the clause types: speech-reporting clauses are structurally larger. Hence, the availability of deletion-under-Agree can be described as a case of Williams Cycle (Williams 2003) or size-dependent opacity in Agree (Keine 2020).
(This talk is a practice talk for NELS.)