Size-Sensitive Sequence of Tense in Hungarian

Abstract The English sentence John said that Mary was pregnant is ambiguous: Its simultaneous reading is John said: ‘Mary is pregnant’; its backshifted reading is John said: ‘Mary was pregnant’. Under Sequence of Tense Analyses of such past-under-past configurations (e.g. Ogihara 1995), the simultaneous reading arises if an embedded past head undergoes “deletion"-under-Agree with the matrix past head (the embedded past form is phonetically unaffected). Without deletion-under-Agree, the embedded past tense remains backshifted. The availability of deletion-under-Agree has been handled as a language-wide parameter, e.g. unlike English, Japanese lacks deletion-under-Agree (e.g. Ogihara and Sharvit 2012). In Hungarian, speech-reporting clauses are Japanese-like and obligatorily backshifted, whereas non-speech-reporting clauses are English-like and have a simultaneous reading. I propose that that speech-reporting clauses are internally larger and hence the impossibility of deletion-under-Agree in these clauses can be analyzed with a Williams Cycle effect (e.g. Williams 2003).