Telicity marking in Hungarian

Abstract

This paper explores the encoding of telicity in Hungarian. While proposing a mereological, scalar semantic analysis, it shows that Hungarian uses a telicity-marking strategy in which it contrasts with English, where telicity is not the direct consequence of an overt marker but arises as a cumulative effect of specific, well-definable properties of various components of verbal predicates including the head verb and its argument(s). A major contribution of the analysis, which mainly addresses telicity marking in the class of non-creation/non-consumption predicates in neutral sentences, lies in the fact that it reveals important cross-linguistic differences with respect to the aspectual role of verbal particles and resultative/locative expressions and the referential properties of telic verbal predicates. As for the former, it is demonstrated that Hungarian verbal particles and resultative/locative expressions mark telicity by directly placing bounds on events by virtue of serving an event maximalizing function, whereas the English counterparts of these elements do not have such direct event-bounding effects. As for the latter, it emerges that in Hungarian quantized reference is a necessary and sufficient condition for telicity in cases where in English it is only sufficient.

Hungarian particle reduplication as local doubling

“…We also note here that there are other constituents in the language that could be argued to possess a telic feature, namely resultative or locative verbal modifiers (in addition to scalar DPs of certain types), see Kardos (2016) for recent arguments. Resultative and locative expressions are also preverbal in neutral clauses and postverbal otherwise, just like particles.…”

“…We follow this kind of two-step movement approach to particles. More specifically, we assume for the purposes of this paper, following Csirmaz (2006) and more recently Kardos (2016), that particles move to the specifier of the AspP projection, via the PredP (cf. 33 below), where AspP is the syntactic encoding of situation aspect.…”

A Frame-Based Analysis of Verbal Particles in Hungarian

“…Traditionally, meg-has mostly been regarded as a pure aspectualizer or perfectivizer signaling perfective aspect and, thereby, determining the viewpoint aspect, as illustrated by the contrast between (3a) and (4a). In more recent studies, meg-is often taken as a delimiter (e.g., Bene 2009), signaling telicity (e.g., Kardos 2016) and, thus, relating to the Aktionsart (lexical aspect) of the predicate (e.g., Kiefer 2009; Kiefer and Németh 2012). The particle meg-is exclusively used in this way (4a), and the other particles discussed in this article can all be used in this way as shown, for example, in (4b) and (4c).…”

The Cognitive Motivation Behind the Semantics of Hungarian Co-Verbial Constructions with Össze and Szét

“…At the level of the lexical aspect, co-verbial constructions in Hungarian indicate that a process is bound and function as telicity markers; when modifying grammatical aspect, they mark perfectivity(Knittel, 2015;Kardos, 2016).6 The list contains only selected examples of co-verbial modifiers used in Hungarian. Compare alsoRounds (2001),Kiss (2002) andGrygiel (2018a).7 See also Grygiel (2018b), (2019).8 For example,Mroczko (1989, p. 379) provides the following sentences: Tegye szét a karját!…”