Link to online event: https://unideb.webex.com/unideb/j.php?MTID=maa9c7d515fb7fb994663df171bf…
Abstract
Hungarian argumental subordinate clauses may be associated with a “propositional proform” (Frey et al. 2016) in the main clause, like azt in (1):
(1) János azt mondja, hogy holnap kap oltást.
John that.ACC says COMP tomorrow gets vaccination
’John says (it) that he gets vaccinated tomorrow.’
In the related literature, this proform has been analyzed in various ways: as an expletive (e.g. Kenesei 1994), as an argument (e.g. Tóth 2000) or as a predicate (e.g. den Dikken 2018). In my presentation, I will argue that out of these three, the argument- and the predicate-based approaches are tenable. Their applicability depends on the “predicationality” of the CP, as discussed in Brandtler & Molnár (2016), and also on the inherent nature of the various pronominals. Accordingly, I will survey the various pronominal forms that can participate in the construction (az ‘that’, úgy ‘so’, olyan ‘such’) and I will explore their morphosyntactic and discourse-properties, presenting novel empirical data. For morphosyntax, I will rely on Dékány’s (2011) layered view of DPs, whereby the deictic feature is independent of the referentiality feature. This enables us to the make a distinction between the predicative proform úgy, which is not referential, but deictic nevertheless (so not empty, expletive in nature), the argumental proform olyan which is deictic and referential at the same time and az, which may be either predicative or argumental. This distinction will be shown to have various grammatical consequences, like the availability of plural-marking and the ability of bearing information structural roles. I will posit that the discourse properties of these proforms fall out from the combination of their morphosyntactic properties and general constraints on pronoun use.
References
Brandtler, Johan & Molnár Valéria. 2016. Rethinking clausal asymmetries: Propositional pronoun insertion in Hungarian. In Werner, Meinunger & Schwabe (2016), 241-269.
den Dikken, Marcel. 2018. Dependency and directionality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kenesei István. 1994. Subordinate clauses. In Kiefer Ferenc & É. Kiss Katalin (eds.), The syntactic structure of Hungarian, 141-165. San Diego: Academic Press.
Tóth Ildikó. 2000. Inflected infinitives in Hungarian. Tilburg: TILDIL Dissertation Series.
Dékány, Éva. 2011. A profile of the Hungarian DP: The interaction of lexicalization, agreement and linearization with the functional sequence. University of Tromsø dissertation.
Frey, Werner, André Meinunger & Kerstin Schwabe (eds.). 2016. Inner-sentential propositional proforms. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.