Particles and a Two Component Theory of Aspect

The syntax of inner aspect in Hungarian

“…As noted earlier, Hungarian verbal particles and result predicates appear in the immediately preverbal position in neutral sentences and often have a telicizing function (Csirmaz 2008a Verbal particles like meg (20a) and result predicates like ropogósra '(lit.) onto crispy' (20b) have been shown to encode an event-maximalizing operator (MAX E ) (Filip & Rothstein 2006), which is applied to a partially ordered set of events, from which they pick out the unique largest event at a given situation, thereby ensuring that the resulting predicates have quantized reference, and thus they are interpreted telically, as shown by the temporal adverbial test (see Kardos 2012Kardos , 2016.…”

“…Evidence for these distinctalbeit relatedaspectual categories with respect to Hungarian has been provided by Csirmaz (2008a). Here we only illustrate the perfective-imperfective distinction with the examples in ( 16), where inner aspect is kept constant; both sentences contain a telic predicate.…”

“…[11] Semelfactives like kattan ʻclickʼ have also been shown to co-occur with egyet, as in A zár kattant egyet ʻThe lock clicked onceʼ (Csirmaz 2008b), but we believe that this egyet behaves differently from the one we discuss in this paper (see also Piñón 2001). For instance, with semelfactives, egyet is a multiplicative expressing the number of times the eventuality denoted by the verb occurred, similarly to the multiplicative egyszer ʻonceʼ.…”

“…[2] The temporal adverbial test cannot be reliably used to diagnose the telicity of verbal predicates like táncolt egyet 'had a dance' in (5b); see É. Kiss (2004) and Csirmaz (2008b). Instead, another standard telicity test will be used to probe for (a)telicity in the case of this and other similar examples (see Section 4).…”

“…Just like on É. Kiss's (2008a) analysis of verbal particles, the telicity of predicates containing pseudo-objects has been regarded as a matter of semantics (Csirmaz 2008b).…”