The semantics of ejsze in the Székely dialect of Hungarian

This paper provides the first formal account of the meaning of the pragmatic marker ejsze in the Székely (Szekler) dialect of Hungarian. Using standard diagnostics of sentence types, we argue that it is compatible with declaratives and constituent interrogatives but not with polar interogatives. We suggest that it makes a contribution analogous to that of German wohl in declaratives, and argue that its use-conditional meaning can be described along the lines proposed for wohl by Eckardt (2020). Accordingly, ejsze is analyzed as an inferential evidential, marking that the prejacent is defeasibly entailed by the maximal body of knowledge of the speaker. The paper discusses contrasts between the distribution and felicity of ejsze vs. wohl, and ejsze vs. talán, an inferential particle that appears both in the standard and in the Székely dialect.