Abstract In chapter 4 ‘Structural focus and exhaustivity’, Katalin É. Kiss claims that the structural focus of the Hungarian sentence, occupying Spec,FocP, and structural focus (e.g. the English cleft), in general, encodes the feature [+exhaustive]. After reviewing the standard arguments for the exhaustivity of structural focus, a new argument against it, proposed by Wedgwood (2005), is examined, and is shown to be based on a false premise. Finally, a new type of evidence is presented. It is argued (following van Kuppevelt (1996), and Wedgwood (2005)) that the ‘exactly n’ reading of a focussed numeral (as opposed to its basic, ‘at least n’ meaning) is a manifestation of its exhaustivity. It is shown that the ‘exactly n’ meaning of focussed numerals is grammaticalized in Hungarian; it is associated with the preverbal focus position, causing obligatory focus movement in the case of certain types of scalar elements, and predictable, structurally determined meaning differences in the case of others.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 72 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.