On focus-raising in Hungarian

Abstract

There is considerable variation among Hungarian speakers in what is called subject focus-raising. This operation takes the subject of an embedded clause and make it appear in the focus position of the matrix clause. There is variation among speakers as to whether they prefer the nominative or the accusative case on such raised subjects, and whether they conjugate the embedded verb in singular or plural if the raised subject is a quantified phrase. This paper discusses some of the background concepts involved in focus-raising and summarizes the findings of some significant studies, i.e derivational strategies for focus-raising, and instances where the raised phrase ends up being the topic instead of the focus.