Basic English Syntax with Exercises

Hungarian

1.2.1 The Lexicon

It is obvious that this knowledge is not predictable from anything. There is no reason why the object that we call a cat should be called a cat, as witnessed by the fact that other languages do not use this word to refer to the same object (e.g. macska (Hungarian), chat (French), Katze (German), gato (Spanish), quatus (Maltese) kot (Russian), kissa (Finnish), neko (Japanese), mao (Chinese), paka (Swahili)). Moreover, there is nothing about the pronunciation [kaet] that means that it must refer to this object: one can imagine a language in which the word pronounced [kaet] is used for almost anything else. This kind of linguistic knowledge is not ‘rule governed’, but is just arbitrary facts about particular languages.

1.3.4.1 Verbs

Some languages show a good deal more agreement phenomena than English. Consider the Hungarian paradigm:

1.3.5.1 Inflections

This distinction is traditionally called a Case distinction, which has to do with the forms that certain nominal arguments appear in. In English there are not many Case distinctions to be seen as it is only the pronouns which have Case forms, but in other languages there can be more such distinctions made (think of Hungarian János, Jánost, Jánosnak, etc.). The he form of the pronoun (similarly, she, I, we, they) is called the nominative case form, while the him form (her, me, us, them) is the accusative case form. Note, finite clauses must have nominative elements in the relevant position, whereas, if the position is filled at all in non-finite clauses, it must be by an accusative element:

2.2.1 The subject

Other languages, however, show a good deal more, as the following Hungarian examples show:

4.2.2 The Specifier of the DP

This behaviour is consistent with the claim that this morpheme does not attach itself to any word, but to the whole phrase. Note this is not the way that Case morphemes behave in other languages. In Hungarian, for example, the accusative case morpheme –t is attached to the noun inside the DP, not to the last element in the DP:

5.2.3.2 Light verbs and ergatives

Of course, showing something to be a possible movement and showing it to be an actual movement are two different things. In order to justify the movement analysis in (51) we might consider a similar construction in Hungarian. Consider the following:

5.2.3.2 Light verbs and ergatives

As we see in these examples, Hungarian has a similar alternation with a set of ‘change of state’ verbs. Moreover, the transitive versions all have a causative reading, just like the English examples we have been looking at. The interesting point is that the Hungarian causative verbs have a special form with the morpheme ít indicating causative:

5.2.3.2 Light verbs and ergatives

Putting aside the issue of tense and agreement inflections, it is possible to give a very similar analysis of the Hungarian causative verbs to the one we proposed for English causatives, with a causative light verb introducing the causative interpretation and the agent subject:

5.2.3.2 Light verbs and ergatives

The difference between English and Hungarian, however, is that the causative element is not phonologically empty in Hungarian. The ít morpheme, however, is a bound morpheme, which means that it must attach to some appropriate stem, i.e. a verb, and this is the trigger for the movement:

6.2.3 Tense and Agreement

Perhaps, then, what ‘inflection’ is, is agreement and this is expressed either as a morpheme dependent on properties of the subject, or a modal. Of course in English the visible tense and agreement morphemes are expressed as a single form, s. But in many languages tense and agreement are expressed as separate morphemes, as they are in Hungarian:

7.4.2 A comparison between relative and interrogative clauses

As pointed out, in many ways the relative clause has many properties in common with a wh-interrogative. But relative clauses are not interrogative, but declarative. This is clear both from their interpretation and the fact that they may start with the complementiser that which as we have seen, introduces declarative clauses. Thus, the wh-element which starts relative and interrogative clauses seems to have a different set of features: an interrogative pronoun is [+wh] and a relative pronoun is [–wh]. One might think therefore that they are entirely different lexical elements. This is supported by the fact that in some languages there are differences between relative and interrogative pronouns. In Hungarian for instance, there is a systematic difference with relative pronouns beginning with a‑: