Particles in German, English, and Beyond

The aim of the paper is to sketch a unified account of the denotation of talán ‘perhaps’ in Hungarian, which appears in declaratives and polar interrogatives encoding assertions and questions. It is suggested for the first time that talán is not only an inferential or conjectural evidential, but also makes reference to the current question under discussion. The account explains some interpretational effects of talán , including the absence of the “interrogative flip” or the obligatory rhetorical