Predication, focus and the positions of negation in Hungarian

The distribution of the Hungarian negative particle nem can be accounted for without the use of any specialised syntactic machinery, given a dynamic, parsing-based approach to the creation of meaningful linguistic structures. This allows inferential pragmatic theory (such as Relevance Theory) to take on much of the burden of explanation. Well-known interactions between nem and a variety of pre-verbal phenomena, notably focused constituents, are explained with reference to ‘main predication’: the point in a sentence at which a full proposition is created. This is represented, using a neo-Davidsonian semantics, as the introduction of existential quantification over an event description with certain necessary properties. Marrying event-based representations with the epsilon calculus of Hilbert and Bernays (1939) allows this to be achieved using a variety of predicates introduced by explicit lexical material.