The grammar and pragmatics of interrogatives and their (special) uses: news
BUSZI-ugye Database is available: The database listing all dialogue fragments of the structured interviews from the corpus Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview (BUSI) that contain the particle ugye is available here. The database consisting of 558 question-answer pairs contains the basic syntactic and pragmatic characteristics of the relevant utterances. Descriptive generalizations based on the corpus data are presented in section 2.5. of Cecília Sarolta Molnár’s doctoral dissertation (2019).
A talk by Hans-Martin Gärtner and Jens Michaelis (Bielefeld) entitled ‘Farewell to V2 Declaratives? A Journey with Preference Semantics and Connexive Logic Crossing the Wupper’ has been accepted for presentation at the workshop ‘Commitments in Grammar and Discourse (Commit22)’, organized as part of the ’44. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS)’ in Tübingen, 23 – 25 February 2022.
A talk by Hans-Martin Gärtner and Andreas Pankau (FU Berlin) entitled ‘Are exam questions non-literal information questions? The challenge from Marzahn German constituent ‘n-interrogatives’ has been accepted for presentation at the Moscow HSE Pragmatics Workshop[link:], to be organized online on September 30th – October 1st, 2021.
Beáta Gyuris, Katalin Mády and Cecília Sarolta Molnár were invited to give a talk at the Pragmatics Roundtable on Experimental Pragmatics in Hungary, organized at the University of Debrecen on 10 September 2021.
Beáta Gyuris was asked to be an invited speaker by Manfred Krifka at the thrid workshop of the SPAGAD (Speech Acts in Grammar and Discourse) ERC-project in February 2021. (Biased Questions: Experimental Results & Theoretical Modelling), in addition to researchers from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), Yale University, University of Maryland, Hokkaido University, Pompeu Fabra University, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Köln, and Konstanz University.
Beáta Gyuris was the invited guest at the radio program Szószátyár, hosted by László Kálmán and Ádám Nádasdy at Klubrádió on 18 November, where they discussed the formal properties and use conditions of questions. The program can be found here.
Hans-Martin Gärtner was asked to be an invited speaker at the Kulturwoche des Germanistischen Instituts at ELTE, on 3 November 2020.
Beáta Gyuris and Hans-Martin Gärtner are teaching a course on “Particles and Questions” for MA and PhD students of theoretical linguistics at ELTE, with the participation of several colleagues from RIL.
The collection ‘GyurMa100: Kérdések Gyuris Beának és Mády Katinak‘ [‘GyurMa100: Questions for Bea Gyuris and Kati Mády], edited by Kinga Gárdai, Anna Kohári, and Cecília Molnár, published by the GyurMa100 Munkacsoport, featuring Gábor Recski’s illustrations, contains more or less serious research problems created for two members of our research group by their colleagues. The list of authors include Rebrus Péter, Cser András, Kenesei István, Maitz Péter, Tomáš Duběda, Hans-Martin Gärtner, Gráczi Tekla Etelka, Gyarmathy Dorottya, Horváth Viktória, Huszár Anna, Krepsz Valéria, Winkler István, Sass Bálint, Bárkányi Zsuzsanna, Szalontai Ádám, Kiss Angelika, Németh T. Enikő, Kálmán László, Kohári Anna, és Molnár Cecília Sarolta. The volume was presented to the recipients in the framework of a gulash-party organized by the ELTE-MTA Theoretical Linguistics Department. Photos about the event can be found here. The recipients would like to express their gratitude to all editors, authors and illustrators, who helped to realize this volume, and happy to invite all members of the linguistics community for joint work on the problems presented in the collection.
The talk ‘Polar questions, bias and the QUD: a case study of Hungarian’ by Beáta Gyuris was accepted to the online ‘Graz QUD workshop — QUDs and exhaustivity: experiments, computation, and theory‘, 25-26 Sept. 2020.
A poster entitled ‘Division of labour between polar interrogatives in Hungarian: A study in dialect semantics’ by Beáta Gyuris, Cecília Sarolta Molnár and Katalin Mády has been accepted for presentation at the 13th conference on Syntax, Phonology, and Language Analysis, organized online by MTA RIL on 24-26 Sept. 2020.
Beáta Gyuris was invited to participate at the 2020 Pragmatics Roundtable on Lexical pragmatics in Hungary (2000-2020), organized online on 2 October 2020 by the Pragmatics Working Group of the Hungarian Linguistics Society, the Hungarian Research Centre for Pragmatics, and the Department of General Linguistics of the University of Szeged.
Hans-Martin Gärtner and Beáta Gyuris edited issue 46/1-2 of the journal Theoretical Linguistics, which contains Beste Kamali and Manfred Krifka’s paper ‘Focus and contrastive topic in questions and answers, with particular reference to Turkish’ and commentaries to it.
We gave a short presentation of the recent results of our research group to the Working Group on Hungarian Linguistics of the Linguistics Committee of HAS on 18 October 2019.
Báeta Gyuris visited the Universität Köln on 10 October 2019, where she consulted Prof. Sophie Repp, Dr. Heiko Seeliger and their students on theoretical and experimental issues concerning question bias. bias.
Cecília Sarolta Molnár defended her PhD dissertation entitled Speciális kérdések? – Az ugye partikulát tartalmazó megnyilatkozások formája és használata [‘Special questions? — The form and use of utterances containing the particle ugye’] with a summa cum laude (100%) at the Theoretical Linguistics Program of the Doctoral School of Linguistics at ELTE. Congratulations!
Hans-Martin Gärtner will be an invited speaker at “SPAGAD-1 – Speech Acts in Grammar and Discourse: Syntactic and Semantic Modeling” (Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin) 30 October – 1 November 2019.
Hans-Martin Gärtner and Beáta Gyuris have been invited to give talks at the Universities of Edinburgh, Newcastle, and Cambridge in October 2019.
Hans-Martin Gärtner and Beáta Gyuris have been invited to give talks at the Balaton Linguistics Summer School, organised by Yasutada Sudo (University College London) and colleagues. The lecturers include researches from the Universities of Göttingen, Wien, UCL, IMS Stuttgart, Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, and MTI.
Hans-Martin Gärtner is a member of the project “Satztyp, Satzmodus, Illokution: Sichtung und (Weiter)Entwicklung kognitiver Ansätze”, financed by the German Science Foundation (DFG), (08/2019-07/2020) Project leader: Markus Steinbach (UGöttingen). The first project meeting is going to take place in RIL-HAS Budapest, with the participation of Henk Zeevat (Düsseldorf) as a special guest. Henk Zeevat will also give a public talk on 14 August, as part of the MASZAT series.
Cecília Sarolta Molnár took part at the Unikornis Tábor (Unicorn Camp) between 15 and 20 July 2019 in Cernat, Romania. This hosted the last round of the Unikornis NYelvi Olimpia (Unicorn Linguistics Oplimpics), where groups that
Molnár Cecília Sarolta 2019. július 15-től 20-ig az Unikornis Tábor programján vettem részt a romániai Csernátonban (Cernat). A táborban zajlik a romániai magyar középiskolásoknak meghirdetett Unikornis Nyelvi Olimpia utolsó fordulója, amelyen a két előző fordulón továbbjutott csapatok mérik össze az erejüket. Az idei táborra 6 háromfős diákcsapat érkezett Erdély különböző régióiból. A tábor programjában a verseny mellett különböző szakmai programok (nyelvészeti műhelyek), csapatépítő foglalkozások és múzeumpedagógiai foglalkozások is szerepeltek. A táborban kolléganőnk azzal a céllal vettem részt, hogy a kérdő mondatok nyelvjárási formáit összegyűjtse, továbbá hogy a nyelvészeti kísérletekről és a nyelvészeti adatgyűjtés módszereiről a tábor szakmai programja keretében nyelvészeti műhelyt tartson a diákoknak. A nyelvészeti műhelyen a nyelvészeti kísérletekkel, a nyelvi adatgyűjtés módszereivel, az egyes módszerek előnyeivel és hátrányaival, illetve a táborban lezajlott adatgyűjtéssel (térképes feladat) foglalkoztak 90 percben.
Eszter Rohacsek (Humboldt University, Berlin) worked as a student assistant to the project for 8 weeks between April and June 2019.
Cecília Sarolta Molnár successfully defended her dissertation entitled “Speciális kérdések? – Az ugye partikulát tartalmazó megnyilatkozások formája és használata” [‘Special questions? The form and use of utterances containing the particle “ugye” ‘is that so’.] at the “home defence” on 25 February 2019.
Beáta Gyuris was an invited speaker at the Workshop Particles in German, English and beyond organized at Saarland University, 21-22 January 2019.
Prof. Anke Holler (Göttingen University) visited the project between 11-17 October 2018, and has given a public lecture entitled ‘Correlative ‘es’ — a Janus face in German grammar’
Hans-Martin Gärtner and Beáta Gyuris are giving a presentation ‘On the Echoic Licensing of Propositional Negation in Hungarian Polar e-Interrogatives’ at the Recent Issues in the Syntax of Questions workshop at the Univerity of Konstanz
Beáta Gyuris received the György Szépe Publication Prize of RIL HAS, for the following paper published in 2017, which summarizes important results of the project: Gärtner, Hans-Martin and Beáta Gyuris 2017. On delimiting the space of bias profiles for polar interrogatives. Linguistische Berichte Heft 251: 293-316.
Hans-Martin Gärtner was invited to participate at the workshop Logophoricity and Perspectivization (Stuttgart–Wackershofen), where he is giving a talk on his research on Icelandic.
Members of our research group received an invitation to give a talk at the 2018 Pragmatics Roundtable at the University of Pécs. The title of the presentation was the following: Gyuris, B. Molnár, C. & Mády, K.: Vélekedések, vágyak, szándékok tükröződése az eldöntendő kérdő mondatok megformálásában [Beliefs, wishes and intentions conveyed by the choice of the form of polar interrogatives]
Beáta Gyuris is giving a presentation at the workshop Meaning in non-canonical questions (7-9 June 2018) at Konstanz University, az important centre for research on interrogatives and question acts.
Hans-Martin Gärtner will be an invited speaker of the Workshop on Non Canonical Imperatives, jointly organized by the Humboldt University of Berlin, and the Leibniz-Centrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) on 25-26 May, 2018. The other invited speakers of the workshop include researchers from the MIT, the University of Connecticut, Humboldt University and the ZAS, and the University of the Faroe Islands.
From 19-23 March 2018, Hans-Martin Gärtner stayed as visiting scholar at the Institute of German and Dutch Languages and Literatures of Free University Berlin (sponsor: Dr. Andreas Pankau).
Hans-Martin Gärtner and Beáta Gyuris are organizing a workshop at GLOW 41, taking place in April 2018 in Budapest, entitled ‘The grammar and pragmatics of interrogatives and their (special) uses‘, with the participation of Prof. Manfred Krifka as invited speaker.
Rebecca Woods (University of Huddersfield) visited our project between 13 and 17 November 2017, and gave a talk at RIL HAS.
Beáta Gyuris was invited by Prof. Luka Szucsich to take part at the workshop Areal Convergence in Eastern Central European Languages and Beyond (27-29 September 2017) at the Humboldt University, Berlin, together with three of her students. The participating students: Cecília Sarolta Molnár, Katalin Jankó, and Mátyás Lagos Cortes.
Beáta Gyuris organized the workshop Pragmatika Kerekasztal (Pragmatics Roundtable) at RIL HAS, where, among researchers of the institute, Cecília Sarolta Molnár also gave a talk, on a topic of our project.
In the framework of the Visiting Researcher Program of HAS, Markus Steinbach (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) is coming for a 3-month stay to Hungary in the spring of 2017, to conduct joint research with Hans-Martin Gärtner, in close cooperation with the project ‘The grammar and pragmatics of interrogatives and their (special) uses’.
Hans-Martin Gärtner and Beáta Gyuris taught a seminar in the Spring Term of the academic year 2015/16 at the ELTE-MTA Theoretical Department for BA, MA and PhD students and interested colleagues with the title ‘Special Questions’.
Beáta Gyuris’s paper ‘New Perspectives on Bias in Polar Questions. A Study of Hungarian -e’ has been pre-published on the website of the International Review of Pragmatics. (Please contact the author directly if you wish to receive an electronic offprint.)
Hans-Martin Gärtner and Beáta Gyuris visited the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies of the University of Bielefeld between 11 and 18 April 2016, supported by the Institute Partnership Program ‘Grammatik und Pragmatik’ of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. They gave a talk at the Linguistik Kolloquium.
Hans-Martin Gärtner taught a mini-course (2 lectures) on ‘Varieties of Dependent Verb Second. The View from Scandinavia’ at the University of Cambridge’, in the framework of the ReCoS Project, on 21 March 2016.
Hans-Martin Gärtner taught a Master/Ph.D. Course (6 double lectures) at Wuppertal University, entitled ‘Verbzweit-Stellung in den germanischen Sprachen mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der skandinavischen Sprachen’, between 4-9 March 2016.
Hans-Martin Gärtner organized, together with Thórhallur Eythórsson and Tonjes Veenstra, a Workshop ‘Morphological Effects on Word Order from a Typological and a Diachronic Perspective’ at the DGfS 38 conference at Konstanz, 24 – 26 February 2016.
Hans-Martin Gärtner teaches a course at the interdisciplinary Göttingen Spirit Summer School on Complex Clauses on ‘Issues in Special and Minor Sentence Types’. Beáta Gyuris gives an evening lecture at the summer school, entitled ‘The semantics and pragmatics of embedded interrogatives in Hungarian’.