Size-Sensitive Sequence of Tense in Hungarian

The English sentence John said that Mary was pregnant is ambiguous: its simultaneous reading is ‘John said: “Mary is pregnant”’; its backshifted reading is ‘John said: “Mary was pregnant”’. Under Sequence of Tense analyses of such past-under-past configurations (e.g., Ogihara 1995), the simultaneous reading arises if an embedded past head undergoes deletion-under-Agree with the matrix past head (the embedded past form is phonetically unaffected). Without deletion-under-Agree, the embedded past tense remains backshifted. The availability of past-deletion-under-Agree has been handled as a language-wide parameter; for example, unlike English, Japanese lacks deletion-under-Agree (e.g., Ogihara and Sharvit 2012). In Hungarian, speech-reporting clauses are Japanese-like and obligatorily backshifted, whereas non-speech-reporting clauses are English-like and have a simultaneous reading. I propose that speech-reporting clauses are internally larger; hence, the impossibility of deletion-under-Agree in these clauses can be analyzed as a Williams Cycle effect (e.g., Williams 2003)

Head (geology) · Impossibility · Past tense · Reading (process) · Sentence · Sequence (biology) · Employee Welfare and Language Studies · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation