Table Of ContentApproaches to Hungarian
Approaches to Hungarian (ATOH)
Starting with Volume 11, containing papers from the 2007 Conference
on the Structure of Hungarian (New York), John Benjamins Publishing
Company publishes the volumes from the biennial Conferences on the
Structure of Hungarian.
For an overview of all books published in this series, please see
http://benjamins.com/catalog/atoh
Previous volumes were published by the University of Szeged Press
(Vols. 1–7) and Akadémiai Kiadó (Vols. 8–10).
Editor
István Kenesei
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Volume 13
Approaches to Hungarian. Volume 13: Papers from the 2011 Lund conference
Edited by Johan Brandtler, Valéria Molnár and Christer Platzack
Approaches to Hungarian
Volume 13: Papers from the 2011 Lund conference
Edited by
Johan Brandtler
Valéria Molnár
Christer Platzack
Lund University
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Approaches to Hungarian : Volume 13: Papers from the 2011 Lund conference / Edited by
Johan Brandtler, Valéria Molnár and Christer Platzack.
p. cm. (Approaches to Hungarian, issn 1878-7916 ; v. 13)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978 90 272 0483 7 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 7147 1 (Eb)
© 2013 – John Benjamins B.V.
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Table of contents
Introduction 1
Reanalysis in Hungarian comparative subclauses 5
Júlia Bácskai-Atkári
Silent people: The pseudo-impersonal 3 3
Michael Brody
Clausal Coordinate Ellipsis (CCE) in Hungarian compared
to CCE in Dutch, German, and Estonian 4 5
Karin Harbusch and István Bátori
Pseudoclefts in Hungarian 6 7
Jutta M. Hartmann, Veronika Hegedűs and Balázs Surányi
Focus, exhaustivity and the syntax of Wh-interrogatives:
The case of Hungarian 9 7
Julia Horvath
A phi-agreement constraint on subject extraction in Finnish 133
Saara Huhmarniemi
Remarks on a novel LFG approach to spatial particle
verb constructions in Hungarian 149
Tibor Laczkó and György Rákosi
Resultative passives in Finnish 179
Satu Manninen
Discourse new, focused, and given 199
Michael Rochemont
Harmony that cannot be represented 229
Miklós Törkenczy, Péter Szigetvári and Péter Rebrus
Index 253
Introduction
We are pleased to present this volume of papers from the 10th International
Conference on the Structure of Hungarian (ICSH 10), held in Lund, August 25–28,
2011. The conference was jointly organized by the Research Institute for Linguistics
at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, and the Centre for Languages
and Literature, Lund University.1
A total of 28 talks were given at the conference, ten of which have been revised
for inclusion in this volume. Two of these focus on Finnish rather than Hungarian,
as a workshop on Scandinavian and Uralic languages was organized in connection
with the conference. The contributions cover a broad range of linguistic topics,
and are therefore listed alphabetically by author rather than thematically.
The first paper, Reanlaysis in Hungarian comparative subclauses by Júlia
Bácskai-Atkári, gives an account of the historical development of Hungarian com-
parative subclauses, with special attention to complementizers and comparative
operators. It is argued that the change in the initial configuration (with hogy ‘that’
as a complementizer) to the new one with mint ‘than’ in the C-head position
(possibly followed by an operator) was the result of two interrelated processes. The
first process was the reanalysis of mint from operator to complementizer; the sec-
ond was the emergence of new comparative operators, following a change in the
syntactic realization of such operators from obligatory deletion to fully acceptable
overt operators. The proposed analysis also shows that several steps in the develop-
ment of comparatives are analogous to those in the development of relative clauses,
leading to the conclusion that the comparative structure in present-day Hungarian
derives from the Old Hungarian comparative structure in a predictable way.
Michael Brody’s paper Silent people: The pseudo–impersonal argues against
the analysis of personal pronouns as universal impersonals, as in In Italy, they like
to take a nap in the afternoon. Here, they can be replaced with people without any
change in meaning. In the absence of the locative adverbial, however, only people
can be used with a generic meaning: People/*They like to take a nap in the
afternoon.
1. The conference was made possible by generous financial support from Kungliga
Vetenskapssamfundet, Stiftelsen Elisabeth Rausing Minnesfond and the Faculty of Humanities
and Theology, Lund University.
Approaches to Hungarian
This difference in behavior indicates that people has something that they lacks,
which in the case of they can be supplied by the locative. Brody shows that per-
sonal pronouns that appear to only be interpretable as universal impersonals in
the presence of a (typically locative) adverbial phrase are in fact not impersonal
pronouns at all. According to Brody, these “universal impersonal cum adverbial”
constructions involve an ordinary anaphoric personal pronoun whose antecedent
is a silent generic people hidden in the locative.
The aim of the paper by Karin Harbusch and István Bátori, Clausal Coordinate
Ellipsis (CCE) in Hungarian in comparison to CCE in Dutch, Estonian and German,
is to set up target-language independent rules to generate clausal coordinate ellip-
sis (CCE). Four main types of CCE are studied in the paper: (i) Gapping with three
variants (long distance, subgapping, stripping); (ii–iii) Forward/Backward Con-
junction Reduction; and (iv) Subject Gap with finite/fronted verb. Earlier research
has shown that these rules are valid for Dutch, German and Estonian. It is argued
that Hungarian, without too many modifications, obeys the rules set up for
Estonian. The main point of interest is the novelty of the approach, which connects
new psycholinguistic research with new computational implementations.
In their paper Pseudoclefts in Hungarian, Jutta Hartmann, Vera Hegedűs, and
Balázs Surányi investigate specificational pseudocleft sentences and argue for a
‘what-you-see-is-what-you-get’ (WYSIWYG) analysis of this phenomenon. Pre-
senting mainly novel data, they propose that the clefted constituent (the pivot) is
the subject of predication, while the cleft clause (wh-clause) acts as the predicate of
the clause. Both the pivot and the wh-clause are base-generated in an underlying
Small Clause (PrP). Their analysis is supported by the distribution of case and
agreement, as well as the strict categorical restrictions on the pivot in Hungarian,
which show clear anti-connectivity effects. The authors also discuss the observed
connectivity effects exhibited by Hungarian pseudoclefts, which they account for
in semantic terms, following Jacobson (1994) and Sharvit (1999).
Julia Horvath addresses two important questions regarding wh-interrogatives
in her paper Focus, exhaustivity and the syntax of Wh-interrogatives: The case of
Hungarian: (i) What drives the obligatory preposing of the interrogative wh-phrase
in Hungarian? And (ii) What role (if any) does the CP layer play in the movement
and interpretation of interrogatives? Contra standard analyses, Horvath argues
that wh-movement is not driven by Focus. This conclusion is an extension of an
earlier proposal that (alleged) Focus movement in Hungarian is driven by an Agree
relation between a phrase associated with an Exhaustivity operator (EI-Op) and a
clausal EI head (EI stands for Exhaustive Identification). Horvath argues that the
EI-Op head is the binder for the bare wh-morpheme, which in turn triggers overt
wh-movement; the [Q]-feature of C0 enters into agreement with the correspond-
ing [Q]-bearing EI-Op phrase (i.e. the wh-phrase). This paper adds yet another
Introduction
perspective to the intriguing theory on Focus that Horvath has been developing
for several years.
The first paper in this volume to address Finnish, Saara Huhmarniemi’s paper
A phi-agreement constraint on subject extraction in Finnish proposes a strict syn-
tactic account of DP-extraction, based on extraction data from a number of differ-
ent constructions: noun phrases, adjective phrases, adposition phrases, non-finite
clauses and finite complement clauses. Showing that subject extraction is more
restricted in Finnish than object extraction, Huhmarniemi argues that this ‘freez-
ing effect’ for the subject can be accounted for in terms of phi-agreement between
the subject and the predicate. Huhmarniemi thus rejects previous analyses of
freezing that have relied on either case-assignment or movement to the subject
position. Her analysis suggests a promising new approach to the syntactic mecha-
nisms behind extraction asymmetries.
Tibor Laczkó and György Rákosi ’s paper Remarks on a novel LFG approach to
spatial particle verb constructions in Hungarian concerns Hungarian particle verb
constructions (PVC), an evergreen topic within Hungarian linguistics. Four different
types of particle verb construction are identified and analyzed. The account is cast in
Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) and the analysis has been computationally im-
plemented using LFG’s Xerox Linguistic Environment platform. The authors explore
the consequences of their proposal compared to earlier accounts and argue that their
LFG approach has two main advantages: (i) it systematically covers both the
productive and the non-productive uses of these constructions by offering explicit,
principled and implementationally tested analyses; and (ii) it develops a treatment of
the behavior of particle verbs exhibiting a special mixture of strongly lexical and
strongly syntactic properties.
In the second paper on Finnish, Resultative passives in Finnish, Satu
Manninen presents a unified analysis of three Finnish participial constructions that
look similar on the outside but are formed in different ways. It is argued that the
head of a Participle Phrase may select different categories, yielding sentences that
are morphologically similar but show different patterns of eventivity, resultativity
and agentivity. One of the types discussed is a relatively recently described con-
struction, formed with tulla, that has clear properties of a passive. These properties
are absent from a similar tulla + translative construction. Manninen’s paper makes
a significant contribution to Finnish syntax in clearly identifying what looks like a
full-fledged agreeing passive, an area of ongoing debate in the literature. In most
previous work, the agreeing cases are treated as copula-adjective constructions.
In his paper Discourse new, focused, and given, Michael Rochemont addresses
the long-standing and challenging questions of how the information-structural
notions discourse new, Focus and Given relate to each other and how they
are represented in grammar. Rochemont makes a crucial distinction between
