From mutual dependency to multiple dimensions: remarks on the DG analysis of "functional heads" in Hungarian

This paper addresses the question if the Focus0 and Neg0 functional heads posited by phrase structural, generative accounts of Hungarian should also be recognized in a dependency-based description of the language. It is argued that the “identificational focus” of a Hungarian clause indeed behaves like a “derived main predicate” (cf. É. Kiss 2007), as suggested by two-clause paraphrases and the fact that its assertion can be independently negated. In DG, Hudson’s (2003) “mutual dependency” based analysis of wh-questions provides a way of capturing this intuition; however, it does so by lifting the acyclicity constraint on dependency hierarchies (Nivre 2004: 9). To avoid this potentially problematic move, I propose an alternative whereby the primacy of the finite verb and the primacy of other (focussed, interrogative or negative) expressions can be linked to separate dimensions of description. The concept of dimensions adopted in the paper is formally similar to XDG’s related notion (Debusmann et al. 2004). In content, however, it is closer to Halliday’s (1994, 2004) understanding of the term.