Colloquium: Anna Szabolcsi: Unconditionals and free choice

The seminal analysis of unconditionals in Rawlins 2013 is founded on the insight that the issue raised by the unconditional adjunct is orthogonal to the issue of the main clause. Rawlins furthermore notes, “Since orthogonality is a generalization of a distribution effect, more classical free choice effects …  can be meta-characterized using orthogonality” (2013: 160).  I will observe that the morpho-syntactic shape of unconditionals in Hungarian calls for a direct (non only meta-) unification with free choice and negative polarity.  This talk will make several steps towards the unification, extending Chierchia 2013 and Dayal 2013 to unconditionals, focusing on Hungarian.