Blog CRC1646

The ICSH is a biennial conference concerning any aspect of the Hungarian language. The host country alternates between a Hungarian and a non-Hungarian location every time, and the 17^th conference was held at the University of Debrecen, Hungary this year (11-12 June). The invited speakers were Ora Matushansky (SFL, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/Université Paris 8) and Markus Pöchtrager (Universität Wien). The conference was followed by a thematic workshop on “New Insights on Demonstratives” (13 June), with Elsi Kaiser (University of Southern California) being the invited speaker.

The conference comprised of fifteen talks which targeted a range of synchronic/diachronic phenomena from different angles (via experiments and various theoretical frameworks). The final two presentations were given by A01’s PhD student Szilvia Daczó and PI András Bárány, respectively. Since there were four submissions related to object agreement in Hungarian, a panel discussion was held to round up the main related issues and to close off the conference. The panel was led by the renowned Katalin É. Kiss (HUN-REN, MTA, ELTE), and a few thought-provoking lightning talks were given by Anikó Lipták, György Rákosi, András Bárány, and Szilvia Daczó.

Szilvia’s talk on long-distance agreement with intransitive matrix verbs in present-day Hungarian detailed the work she has done so far as part of the project A01 that investigates morpho-syntactic creativity. Regular object-verb agreement is a well-known feature of Hungarian, yet – with the exception of Bárány 2020 – not many have explored those verb-infinitive-object structures where object agreement surfaces on a (non-object-selecting) intransitive verb due to the presence of a definite object selected by a transitive infinitive. Szilvia presented the results of her corpus work, discussing tense, person-number, and constituent order distributions, as well as verb-specific variation. These raised questions about acceptability among native speakers of Hungarian, a pilot test of which was the topic of the remainder of her talk. The results of the experiment indicate that this structure is moderately grammatical, with factors such as constituent order and analogy from the equivalent structure with canonical transitive matrix verbs having an additional – though not always favourable – effect on acceptability judgements. The audience then provided useful insights and questions for future work.

Thereafter, Szilvia brought up a secondary yet intriguing aspect to her dataset during the fast-paced panel session. She felt very honoured to engage with those most knowledgeable scholars who have majorly contributed to our understanding of object agreement in Hungarian.

The final talk was given by András, who contrasted the two main views Hungarian object markers – namely, whether they are in nature agreement markers or clitics. Applying cross-linguistically established morphological, semantic, and syntactic diagnostics for identifying clitics and agreement markers, he argues that Hungarian has morphologically bound agreement markers, unlike languages such as Inuktitut, Amharic, and multiple descendants of Indo-European.

Regarding the panel, András’ contribution dealt with one particular form in the Hungarian object agreement which has been characterised as special in the literature. András argued that a change of perspective on Hungarian object agreement makes the “special” form -lak/-lek a fully regular part of the overall system.

Reference:

Bárány, A. 2020. Hosszú távú egyeztetés intranzitív igékkel a magyarban [Long-distance agreement with intransitive verbs in Hungarian]. ÁNyT 32. 55–68

See also: The Programme of the ICSH17, Abstracts by Szilvia Daczó and András Bárány

The venue of the ICSH17: University of Debrecen, main building © Szilvia Daczó

The Poster of ICSH17

András Bárány © Sascha Hermannski, SFB 1646

Szilvia Daczó © Sascha Hermannski, SFB 1646