Pragmasemantic Analysis of the Hungarian Inferential – Evidential Expression szerint

Abstract

The Hungarian inferential-evidential expression szerint ‘according to somebody/some-thing’ is highly multifaceted. It can be furnished with person and number suffixes. It can occur in all major sentence types but with different person features and/or collocations. It can be associated with a quotative meaning and can express some kind of judgment in declarative sentences and questions, too. Imperative sentences can serve as a source of its further uses: it can be interpreted both as advice and as an expression of the speaker’s firm stance typically based on moral concerns. We intend to account for this extremely complex distribution with respect to person, attitude, sentence type and collocation in a highly sys-tematic and explanatorily adequate manner in the “cognitively viable” representationalist dynamic discourse- and mind-representation theory ReALIS. We attempt to carry out this task in a way that sheds new light on how such expressions make language a basic means of achieving epistemic control and intersubjective alignment.