Radically Truncated Clauses in Hungarian and Beyond: Evidence for the Fine Structure of the Minimal VP

Abstract

This article explores the syntax of radically truncated clauses in colloquial Hungarian. I argue that radically truncated clauses arise when, in informal speech situations and under time pressure, the derivation is terminated prematurely, at the VP level, and the bare VP (lacking any of the higher functional projections) is sent to spellout (PF) and semantic interpretation (LF). Due to their radically truncated nature, such clauses provide us a unique window through which it becomes possible to explore the fine structure of the minimal VP in itself. I show that radically‐truncated‐clause data are highly relevant to various theoretical questions, such as the head–complement branching order, the adjunction analysis of topicalization and quantification, and the split‐DP proposal. I argue that observations about radically truncated clauses support the availability of OV as a nonderived, basic word order, that they are in line with the adjunction analysis of topicalization and quantifier raising, and that they corroborate the split‐DP analysis of arguments. The discussion is supported with evidence from corpus data and with rigorous statistical analysis of grammaticality‐judgment‐survey results.

Reconstructing the decoupling of case and agreement in Old Hungarian

“…SVO is the most frequent surface word order (as subjects are likelier to be topicalized than objects). It has been argued recently that Hungarian is still an OV language below the surface (Halm 2021); this, however, does not affect the generalization concerning surface word order. 11.…”

Principles of corpus querying: A discussion note

“…In this case, we can query a known example, look at the the surronding listing, collect new examples from the context, and then iterate this method until we do not find new examples. An example of such a phenomenon is villany lekapcsol 'light switches.off', where the interesting feature is that the object is used in subject form (Halm 2021). This method can be called "listing as context" querying.…”

Surprise: Nonfinite Clause with Finite Complementizer

“…Then this VP is merged with a functional category Force, which accounts for its imperative nature. If this were the case, then they would be comparable with Halm's (2021) 'radically truncated clauses', in which the verb occurs completely deprived of phi-feature agreement, tense, aspect and mood features. This proposal is not likely to be applicable to the construction under scrutiny.…”