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The purpose of these introductory remarks is to complement the following case studies by Ferenc Kiefer on majd ‘later (on), sooner or later’, Attila Peteri on hadd ‘let’, and Ildiko Vasko on persze ‘of course’. What we will do is sketch a number of what we consider promising theoretical developments that have a bearing on the issues raised in these studies. In a section addressing issues of form (section 2), we discuss “cartographic” approaches to adverb(ial) hierarchies and the clausal “left periphery”, as well as pragmatic markers within clause types. In a section focusing on issues of interpretation (section 3), we deal with pragmatic markers from the perspective of “projective meaning” and “conversational moves”.

This paper proposes an explanation of the apparent scope inversion attested in sentences pronounced with a rise fall intonation contour. It argues that a left-peripheral quantifier pronounced with a (fall-)rise is in topic position (Spec, TopP). A topic phrase must refer to an individual already present in the domain of discourse-that which will be predicated about in the sentence. Non-individual-denoting expressions, among them quantifiers, can also be made suitable for the topic role if they are assumed to denote a property which the rest of the sentence predicates some higher-order property about. A quantifier functioning as a contrastive topic denotes a property of plural individuals, and its apparent narrow scope arises from the fact that it is considered to be a predicate over a variable inherent in the lexical representation of the verb.

The paper investigates VP-ellipsis in coordinate structures in Hungariandisplaying no formidentity between the antecedent and the elided verbs. Itdefends the view that a well-defined subset of such instances of ellipsis,i.e., those involving morphologically related verbs connected by systematicsemantic relations, is not based on semantic or pragmatic inference strategiesbut on regularities encodable in the lexical representation of the relevantverbs in terms of meaning postulates. The paper identifies four classes ofsuch meaning postulates for Hungarian, which state equivalence or entailmentrelations between propositions containing morphologically related verbs ordifierent senses of the same verb appearing in difierent argument structures.