Tóth Enikő's book "Empirical Perspectives on the Use of Hungarian Nominal Demonstratives" has just been published by Toronto University Press.
The fundamental purpose of this book is to provide an account of the semantics and pragmatics of Hungarian nominal demonstratives by examining why a speaker opts for a given demonstrative form in a particular speech situation and by investigating how the meaning of a demonstrative interacts with contextual clues during the process of reference resolution. These questions are addressed from an empirical perspective; the study incorporates the results of experimental work and corpus-based analyses. The volume emphasizes the need to rely on various types of data source obtained by the application of diverse methods (including elicitation, corpus-linguistic and experimental methods) to develop a comprehensive account of demonstrative use. The empirical findings reported contribute to our understanding of demonstrative practice as an interactional process between the speaker and the addressee; it is argued that demonstrative reference in Hungarian is a dynamic, highly context-dependent, interactive and addressee-oriented process.
This research was done within the Demonstratives Research Group at DEL and was supported by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NKFIH), grant no. K22_143417.
