These books aim to present a synthesis of the currently available syntactic knowledge of the Hungarian language, rooted in theory but providing highly detailed descriptions, and intended to be of use ...to researchers, as well as advanced students of language and linguistics. As research in language leads to extensive changes in our understanding and representations of grammar, the Comprehensive Grammar Resources series intends to present the most current understanding of grammar and syntax as completely as possible in a way that will both speak to modern linguists and serve as a resource for the non-specialist.
These books aim to present a synthesis of the currently available syntactic knowledge of the Hungarian language, rooted in theory but providing highly detailed descriptions, and intended to be of use ...to researchers, as well as advanced students of language and linguistics. As research in language leads to extensive changes in our understanding and representations of grammar, the Comprehensive Grammar Resources series intends to present the most current understanding of grammar and syntax as completely as possible in a way that will both speak to modern linguists and serve as a resource for the non-specialist.
The paper gives a thorough insight into the system of possible forms of (in)alienably possessed nouns in Hungarian. Its point of departure is the group of Nominative + -j- +A possessive forms the ...stem of which has an alternative (morphologically “shorter”) possessive form; such longer possessive forms are claimed to express alienable possession (see den Dikken 2015). We point out that Hungarian deverbal nominals― and especially the groups of T-nouns―play an interesting role in this system via the thematic character of their possessors (given the obvious connection between alienable possession and external argumenthood, on the one hand, and inalienable possession and internal argumenthood, on the other).
The paper investigates Hungarian imperative sentence types from a pragmaticosemantic point of view. In addition to the baseline imperative, it analyzes types with non-standard intonation pattern ...and/or discourse markers. We apply the (S)DRT-based discourse-semantic framework of ℜeALIS for the examination and representation of five form–function pairs. The discussed types are all assigned an intensional profile which encodes the interlocutors’ beliefs, desires and intentions (from the addresser’s perspective). The analysis derives the different meanings of the variants from parametric differences.
The paper systematically investigates operators in post-head positions within the three constructions referring to states of affairs in Hungarian, that is, within verbal, deverbal nominal and ...infinitival phrases. Hungarian is well-known to be a language in which all types of operator can be, and are usually, spelt out in the pre-head zone. However, it has not been discussed in a systematic and comprehensive way earlier whether operators can appear in post-head positions. The paper points out that this is partially possible via a systematic overview of six basic operator types. It also illustrates that while spelling out operators in the pre-head zone results in unambiguous constructions, placing them in post-head positions yields different types of ambiguity. As for the acceptability of scope taking arguments, finite verbal constructions show a black-and-white picture while infinitival and deverbal nominal constructions can be characterized by gray zones in respect of the readiness of arguments to take scope from post-head position. In these “gray zones”, a somewhat speaker-dependent variation can be observed, presumably with underlying microvariation. To represent and interpret our findings, we use Grohmann’s (2000, 2003) phase-theoretic approach with its pragmasemantics-based three Spell-Out domains per cycle.
The paper presents the interpretation and explanation of the findings of two pieces of experimental research within the framework of Varga's (2016) pitch-tier model of the Hungarian declarative ...sentence. One of the experiments was established to investigate the information-structural contribution of quantified expressions (such as mindhárom barátom ‘all three of my friends’ and Csaba is ‘Csaba also’). The other experiment explored the acoustic features of the spontaneous-speech specific discourse marker hát ‘well/so’. The two topics can be regarded as interconnected if Varga's model is interpreted in the strong sense that pitch – presumably in a more or less strong correlation with intensity – is responsible for indicating the topic–comment dichotomy and other factors of the discourse-embedding of sentences. Thus, the reconciliation of our data with Varga's model requires the consideration of the pitch-tier substructures in their complex dynamism. The experiments support the plausible hypothesis that the variants of the discourse marker hát as part of the preparatory contour primarily differ in duration, while is-quantifiers in different pitch-tier parts differ in terms of pitch values
In Hungarian, the scope order of preverbal (non-in-situ) constituents corresponds to their surface order. Quantifiers and certain other operator expressions ω under the fall-rise contour typical of ...contrastive topics, however, apparently violate this generalization by giving the impression of having inverse scope, relative to some kind of focus operator. The solution to this "scope inversion" puzzle in Hungarian proposed by Gyuris (2009) rests on the following, unexplained, observation: "only those Hungarian sentences containing a contrastive topic are well-formed that have well-formed counterparts with the contrastive topic expression in postverbal position." We claim that the Gyuris-style "well-formed counterpart" can serve as an initial state of syntactic derivation from which the problematic word-order variant can be constructed by moving the whole "big" ωP constituent (containing the finite VP) to the left periphery but by spelling it out there only partially. The crucial point is that in this way the inverse-scope puzzle simply vanishes, because, within the "big" ωP constituent, the meaning-reflecting Foc>ω scope order does not change through the whole process of derivation, and what finally takes scope over the focus is factually a contrastively topicalized (proposition-based) property type semantic content, and not the semantic content that the sentence-initial noun phrase under the fall-rise contour suggests.
Hungarian relevant-set based operators, such as universally quantified noun-phrases and the also-quantifier, signal a logico-pragmatic relation between their explicit meaning and a broader implicit ...set of relevant participants which property can be mentioned as “double referentiality” of the operator. Furthermore, they indicate the new or correcting information in a topic–predicate dimension which belongs to the broader world of the discourse. Our research aims to identify the differences by investigating the suprasegmental features of each-quantifiers and alsoquantifiers on the Hungarian left-periphery indicating the two functions in the topic–predicate dimension. Short sentences in which quantifiers functioning either as the main (new/correcting) information or as a topic (anchor of relevant information) were read by 41 non-linguist native Hungarian subjects. The pitch, intensity and duration properties were analyzed by Praat. On the basis of paired t-tests of the data, it can be stated that a two-dimension model of information structure is required to capture the phenomenon.
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