This paper reports on the results of a pioneering pilot production study and a corpus study aimed at exploring demonstrative use in child Hungarian. Production data from an elicitation task have revealed that children use proportionally more distal demonstrative items than members of the adult control group. We have found a similar difference between child language and child-directed adult language data in an independent corpus study that we have conducted. The experimental results indicate that the demonstrative use of 4-year-old children is divergent: adopting the terminology introduced by Clark and Sengul (1978), some children are at the NO CONTRAST stage, others show signs of being at the transitional, PARTIAL CONTRAST stage, and 6 children out of 13 participants have already developed adult-like patterns, they are at the FULL CONTRAST stage.

This paper presents the results of a small corpus query and a production study exploring demonstrative use in child Hungarian. 13 children between the ages of 3;6 and 4;6 and 11 adults participated in a jigsaw puzzle completion task. We found a significant association between the relative distance of the referent from the speaker and demonstrative choice in both the target group and the adult control group. There is, nevertheless, a strong overall difference between the two groups: children use more distals than proximals, unlike adult controls, who reverse this pattern. We argue that Hungarian children may overuse the distal demonstrative because it serves as the default option in non-contrastive contexts, and is the unmarked form with grammaticalised, non-spatial functions.

A tárgyként használt egyes szám 1. és 2. személyű visszaható névmás a tárgyragot választhatóan veheti fel a magyarban:(1) a.A mennyekben éreztem magam(

The LFG approach to anaphora explicitly recognizes the substantial amount of variation that we see attested in the grammar of anaphoric elements, and it offers a lexi-calist account that captures this diversity. This chapter provides an overview of the major tenets of this approach. We discuss how LFG captures prominence relations between anaphors and antecedents, as well as the inventory of further constraints that determine the size of the binding domain and the search for an antecedent. The chapter includes a brief commentary on logophoric elements and on how the anaphoric dependency itself is represented in LFG accounts, and it concludes with an outlook on other pertinent issues addressed in the LFG literature.

This article reviews The NP-strategy for Expressing Reciprocity: Typology, History, Syntax and Semantics

This paper investigates hitherto unnoticed variation in the linguistic coding of spatial anaphora in locative PPs in Hungarian. While Hungarian primarily employs reflexives in these configurations, it is well-known that pronouns are the default strategy in English, and the reflexive anaphor is allowed in locative PPs only in the presence of certain licensing factors. One such factor is the availability of body-oriented readings (Rooryck & Vanden Wyngaerd 2007, 2011), and we argue here that this plays an important role in Hungarian, too. The paper reports the findings of a corpus study and an online questionnaire study and shows that pronouns are not only acceptable in Hungarian spatial anaphora, but either outperform or form a viable alternative to reflexives when the location denoted by the PP is not close to the referent of the antecedent. A secondary effect of structure building is also observable in two configurations of the extended PP. We argue that the employment of a possessive structure in certain PPs, and moving a P-element to a CPPP cap may also contribute to saving pronouns in contexts of spatial anaphora.

Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a nontransformational theory oflinguistic structure, first developed in the 1970s by Joan Bresnan andRonald M. Kaplan, which assumes that language is best described andmodeled by parallel structures representing different facets oflinguistic organization and information, related by means offunctional correspondences. This volume has five parts. Part I,Overview and Introduction, provides an introduction to core syntacticconcepts and representations. Part II, Grammatical Phenomena, reviewsLFG work on a range of grammatical phenomena or constructions. PartIII, Grammatical modules and interfaces, provides an overview of LFGwork on semantics, argument structure, prosody, information structure,and morphology. Part IV, Linguistic disciplines, reviews LFG work inthe disciplines of historical linguistics, learnability,psycholinguistics, and second language learning. Part V, Formal andcomputational issues and applications, provides an overview ofcomputational and formal properties of the theory, implementations,and computational work on parsing, translation, grammar induction, andtreebanks. Part VI, Language families and regions, reviews LFG workon languages spoken in particular geographical areas or in particularlanguage families. The final section, Comparing LFG with otherlinguistic theories, discusses LFG work in relation to othertheoretical approaches.

Abstract That noun phrases may constitute a binding domain is a key component among the parallelisms between the syntax of noun phrases and clauses. Reuland (2007, 2011) and Despić (2011, 2015) have shown recently that the definite article plays a crucial role in delimiting this domain, since dedicated possessive reflexive anaphors are only possible in languages that lack a prenominal definite article. Hungarian has several anaphoric possessor strategies, which vary in whether they require, allow, or prohibit the use of the definite article in the possessive noun phrase. This paper gives an overview of the grammar of these strategies, and presents a discussion of the results of a questionnaire survey that was conducted to better understand the delicate distribution of the definite article in these constructions. The importance of these Hungarian data lies in showing that Reuland’s conjecture describes an important factor not only in cross-linguistic, but also in language internal variation in definite article use in possessive DP’s.

Laczko & Rakosi (2019) analyze the binding relations of Hungarian anaphors occurring within possessive DPs. They introduce a new feature: BDD "binding domain delimiter" associated with the lexical form of the definite article. Furthermore, they assume that within Hungarian possessive DPs there are two [-r] grammatical functions available to arguments of complex event nominals: SUBJ and POSS. In this paper we will show that their analysis is on the right LFG-theoretic lines, because it handles the crucial binding facts appropriately. However, we will also demonstrate that it cannot capture some further related phenomena; therefore, we will propose an important modification of their account that will also cover these further cases. In addition to adopting their SUBJ PRO analysis of the external argument of a "transitive" derived nominal, we will subscribe to the view that the by-phrase realizing such an external argument bears the OBLag grammatical function, which is more feasible than a suppression account. Finally, we will explore the treatment of obligatory control into Hungarian DPs from an LFG perspective. We will argue for the anaphoric control approach as opposed the functional control alternative.

This extensive and important volume of 21 chapters is reviewed by two committed "Chomskyans".CsP has been doing syntax and in general, form-related sentence processing and child development research combined with an interest in the history of cognitive science for 50 years, while MR is a graduate student with a background in formal syntactic theory and working on a PhD about semantic development using a rather innatist developmental frame.We advance these characterizations of ourselves in order to save the reader from discovering that we are inadvertently somewhat biased, to the extent that we approach the volume from the vantage point of our respective backgrounds.This handbook gives a broad and in-depth overview of the developments in contemporary syntactic theory, embedded into a history of the last 50 years.It offers not only detailed descriptions of the analytical tools that are employed in different frameworks, but also presents the metatheoretical assumptions underlying each approach.It is the latter aspect that is given most emphasis in this volume and this is not only reflected by the amount of space given to historical background information and meta-theory, but also by the selection of theories, which are pressumably meant to cover a wide range of conceptually distinct frameworks.The first part of the book consists of 13 chapters in which various experts characterize individual theories along with a sample analysis, including Cognitive Grammar (Cristiano Broccias), Construction Grammar (Rui P. Chaves), Simpler Syntax (

Hungarian employs reflexives in contexts of spatial anaphora to encode a referential dependency with clause-mate antecedents, and pronouns are generally unacceptable in the same configuration.This study shows that pronouns are also an option nevertheless in certain cases for most speakers, the major licensing factor being the distance between the antecedent and the figure located.Our results show that the constraints that govern the distribution of different types of pronominals in spatial anaphora in English are also relevant in Hungarian, albeit to a weaker degree.

In this paper we develop an LFG analysis of the binding relations of Hungarian anaphors when they occur within possessive DPs. The reflexive is subject to the Minimal Complete Nucleus Condition, and the reciprocal is subject to the Minimal Finite Domain Condition. When either the reflexive or the reciprocal pronoun occurs within a possessive DP, neither of them can be anaphorically bound from outside if this DP contains the definite article (Rakosi 2017, to appear). Our analysis has two crucial aspects. On the one hand, we introduce a new feature: "binding domain delimiter" associated with the lexical form of the definite article. We use this feature as a negative off-path constraint in modelling the relevant binding relations. On the other hand, following Laczko (2004, 2009), we assume that within Hungarian possessive DPs there are two [-r] grammatical functions available to arguments of complex event nominals: POSS and SUBJ. Both can be overtly realized by either the nominative or the dative possessor constituent, and, in addition, SUBJ can also be PRO. Thus, we create a DP-internal antecedent for the anaphors in a principled manner, which, in turn, can be controlled from outside the DP.

The paper describes the grammar of anaphoric possessor strategies in Hungarian, and it outlines the framework of an analysis where the presence or absence of the definite article plays a crucial role in the determination of the referential dependency that anaphoric possessors are part of. The starting point is Reuland's (2007, 2011) conjecture that predicts that dedicated reflexive possessors are only available in languages that do not employ definite articles. Definite articles define a phasal domain, which determines the local syntactic context for binding. Hungarian, being a DP language where possessive phrases are known to include definite articles, does not have a dedicated reflexive possessor. It does, however, have a range of anaphoric possessor strategies, and the definite article shows an interesting distribution across these. The paper argues that in the presence of a definite article the possessive DP acts as a phase, and the dependency between the anaphoric possessor and its antecedent is not local. The definite article is absent in another set of anaphoric possessor strategies, which results in the possessor being licensed at the edge of the possessive DP. Following Despićʼs (2015) analysis proposed for other languages, I argue that anaphoric possessors of this latter type enter a local dependency with their antecedent in the embedding clause.

In a number of languages, children have problems with the interpretation of pronouns if a potential local antecedent is present. There is an intensive debate on whether this effect is due to a delayed acquisition of Principle B, or it is the result of pragmatic or processing difficulties that children face in interpretation tasks. We conducted two experiments involving a picture-sentence verification task to investigate whether the Pronoun Interpretation Problem exists in Hungarian child language. We found that the Problem is present if the test sentences are given in isolation, but it disappears if a minimally coherent discourse is created. We argue that our results support the view that the binding principles are innate and do not need to be acquired, but children have problems with computing coreference options in certain contexts (Reinhart 2004; 2006; 2011). Coherent discourse allows children to accommodate pronouns with close to adult-like success because in this case they do not calculate local coreference possibilities for pronouns.

The paper brings evidence that stative object experiencer verbs (aggaszt 'worries') and dative experiencer verbs (tetszik 'appeals to') are two-place unaccusatives in Hungarian, and it argues for a free merger account of the two internal arguments of these psychological verbs. It discusses binding data to substantiate the free merger proposal, and it provides an analysis in the framework of Reinhart's (2000, 2001, 2002) Theta System.