Approaches To Hungarian

This volume contains selected papers from the 13th International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian (Budapest, 2017).The contributions address current issues in Hungarian linguistics, including comparisons with other languages (e.g., English, German, Turkish, Arabic, Spanish). Specifically, the phonetics and phonology papers present experimental and corpus studies of /h/ voicing, the acoustics of Hungarian word stress, and vowel harmony in harmonically mixed stems. The papers on syntax and semantics discuss object agreement and its locality restrictions, equative markers in German and Hungarian diachronically and synchronically, anaphoric possessor strategies and definite article distribution, and the semantics of various aspectual adverbs. Experimental studies of information structure examine the linear placement of textually given topical constituents post-verbally, exhaustivity inferences with focus partitioning in German, English and Hungarian, and contextual factors licensing Hungarian structural focus. The broad range of topics ensures that this volume will interest scholars of Hungarian and theoretical linguists more generally.

This volume contains eight papers, all presented at the 9th International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian (University of Debrecen, 2009), addressing a great variety of topics in the syntax, morphology, phonology, and semantics of Hungarian, and also offering discussion of related phenomena in other languages. The volume includes a syntax-based analysis of Hungarian external causatives in the framework of the Minimalist Program (MP); argumentation for the lack of phonological or acoustic evidence for secondary stress in Hungarian; an MP approach to a Hungarian modal construction with a counterfactual, reproaching reading; empirical arguments for assuming that in the case of embedded sentences factivity is irrelevant for syntax, and clauses are differentiated by referentiality; a comprehensive semantic account of result states in Hungarian; a claim that certain paradigmatic/morphophonological variation in the Hungarian verbal paradigm is caused by conflicting paradigmatic pressures; a purely interface-based MP account of the syntax of identificational focus in Hungarian; and an analysis of arbitrarily interpreted null subjects in Hungarian with third person, plural agreement on the finite and infinitival verb. The volume will be of interest not just to scholars working on Hungarian, but to a general audience of generative linguists.

This volume of papers selected from the 11th International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian addresses current topics in Hungarian linguistics, focusing on their theoretical implications.The papers in syntax investigate the complement zone of nouns, the syntax of case assigning adpositions, sluicing in relative clauses, generic/habitual readings in clauses containing a free choice item, the argument structure of experiencer verbs in Hungarian, and cataphoric propositional pronoun insertion in Hungarian and German. The papers in morphosyntax analyze morphological alienability splits and the manifestation of the Inverse Agreement Constraint in Hungarian. The studies in phonetics and phonology inquire into regressive voicing assimilation in Hungarian and Slovak, and explore the predictions of the Functional Load Hypothesis for stress-marking and the relationship between the phonetic and phonological properties of /a:/ in Hungarian. The volume will appeal not just to scholars working on Hungarian, but to a general audience of theoretical linguists.

This volume brings together ten papers, all presented at the 8th International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian (New York City, 2007), addressing a wide range of topics in the morphology, phonetics, phonology, pragmatics, semantics, and syntax of Hungarian, with discussion of related facts in other languages as well. The volume includes an analysis of the morphophonology of the infinitival suffix in Optimality Theory, a plea for a phonetically-grounded theory of phonology based on partial neutralization of the v/f contrast, a Government Phonology account of vowel/zero alternations, a discussion of the recursive nature of speech prosody, a context-structure perspective on the pragmatics of polarity particles, a novel outlook on the prosody, semantics, and syntax of negative quantifiers, a structural approach to the difference between factive and non-factive complements and the distribution of the clausal expletive azt, a pioneering study of the licensing and position of overt nominative subjects of infinitival complement clauses, a lexicalist perspective on the distribution of ablative cause-PPs in anti-causative constructions, and an analysis of the complicated morphosyntax of adpositional preverbs and their doubling in terms of partial chain reduction in a phase-based cyclic mapping of syntax to phonology. The volume will be of interest not just to scholars working on Hungarian, but to a general audience of generative linguists.