Chapter 6. On a continuum from categorical to thetic judgment

Abstract

This paper addresses the relationships between the existential reading of sentences with an indefinite subject and the presence of a spatial anchoring constituent. We investigated a corpus of French sentences with indefinite subjects in preverbal position and their translation into Hungarian. While French has a rather rigid word order, Hungarian is a discourse configurational language which signals the informational status of sentence constituents. Through the prism of differentiations made in the Hungarian translation, we distinguished two groups of indefinite subject sentences, one having a thetic interpretation, the other retaining a categorical – or categorical-like – interpretation despite the indefinite form of the subject. These sentences illustrate the fact that while indefinite NPs are known to be bad topics, they can nevertheless play this role to various degrees.