Beata Gyuris: The Semantics and Pragmatics of the Contrastive Topic in Hungarian

This work has two major aims. On the one hand, it intends to describe the characteristic semantic properties of the constituents playing the role of the contrastive topic in the Hungarian sentence, the presuppositions and implicatures introduced by these constituents, and the essential properties of the discourses they can appear in. On the other hand, it aims to explain how the truth-conditional meanings of sentences containing such constituents can be accounted for, with special emphasis on how the scope of quantificational expressions as contrastive topics is to be derived, and on how the availability of distributive versus collective readings for plural noun phrases playing the latter role is to be explained.