On dative causers in Hungarian

Abstract

This paper aims at investigating a special, causative use of dative case in Hungarian that has not received much attention in the literature so far. I show that Hungarian dative causers differ from dative causers in the languages of the Balkan Sprachbund, German, or Spanish in important ways. What makes Hungarian dative causers different is that they are not licensed and interpreted via syntactic structure but are lexically determined to be causative given that dative case has a special, causative lexical entry in Hungarian.