Pragmatic Interfaces – serie

Deixis and the use of demonstratives are widely studied topics across languages. The fundamental purpose of this book is to provide an account of the semantics and pragmatics of Hungarian nominal demonstratives by examining why a speaker opts for a given demonstrative form in a particular speech situation and by investigating how the meaning of a demonstrative interacts with contextual clues during the process of reference resolution. These questions are addressed from an empirical perspective; the study incorporates the results of experimental work and corpus-based analyses. The present volume emphasizes the need to rely on various types of data source obtained by the application of diverse methods (including elicitation, corpus-linguistic and experimental methods) to develop a comprehensive account of demonstrative use. The empirical findings reported contribute to our understanding of demonstrative practice as an interactional process between the speaker and the addressee; it is argued that demonstrative reference in Hungarian is a dynamic, highly context-dependent, interactive and addressee-oriented process.The volume not only expands current approaches to the use of Hungarian nominal demonstratives, it also provides new insights on demonstrative use in a language where this phenomenon has not been explored by empirical tools before. The data collected and the research findings make valuable contributions to the current international debate on the role of factors that govern the choice of demonstratives in different languages.

In recent years, research on the nature of linguistic evidence has gained significant attention. One key finding is that linguistic inquiry should not rely solely on a single source of evidence such as introspection, corpus data, or real or thought experiments, but rather combine several types within a single study. However, integrating these diverse forms of evidence presents serious methodological challenges. Broadly, two main situations can arise. The first is the convergence of evidence, wherein different types of data jointly support a hypothesis. In such cases, the hypothesis becomes more robust than it would be if supported by only one kind of evidence. Over the past decade, the concept of converging evidence in linguistics has been widely explored and discussed. The second, much less studied situation, is the divergence of evidence. Evidence diverges when different sources point towards incompatible hypotheses about a linguistic phenomenon. While convergence strengthens theoretical claims, divergence exposes inconsistencies that require explanation.Written accessibly, Diverging Evidence in Semantics and Pragmatics focuses on cases in which diverging evidence in semantics and pragmatics leads to inconsistencies, providing insight on how linguistic theories can account for conflicting data and the challenges they pose for empirical research.