A stress-based approach to the syntax of Hungarian focus

A focused constituent contains the most prominent stress of the clause (Selkirk, 1984; Reinhart, 1995). Reinhart accounts for this by a PF/LF mapping rule. I extend this view to Hungarian, a language with contrastive focus movement & show that a range of data, some of which pose a problem for a feature driven approach, can be accounted for straightforwardly. Among these are the uniqueness of focus movement & the fact that verb-focusing does not strand the particle of particle-verbs (verb-movement generally strands it). The analysis extends to blocking effects between focusing & a phenomenon called particle climbing. It is concluded that the [+Focus]-feature is unnecessary to account for the data. Finally, it is shown that the alleged identificational focus vs new information focus distinction of E. Kiss (1998) is not supported by Hungarian data. 65 References. Adapted from the source document