The Syntax of Hungarian (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Syntax of Hungarian Edward J. Vajda Katalin É. Kiss . The Syntax of Hungarian. In the series Cambridge Syntax Guides. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Pp. xii + 278. US$70.00 (hardcover), $26.00 (paperback). For a variety of reasons, this monograph should be considered together with an earlier volume on Hungarian syntax co-edited by the same author (Kiefer and É. Kiss 1994). Both books follow a generative framework, yet both seek first and foremost to account for the broadest possible variety of syntactic structures rather than elaborate upon the latest theoretical flourishes. Both are also complementary in that each deals with a largely non-overlapping set of problems of formal interest to syntacticians. And taken together, the two books cover a great deal of descriptive ground and make excellent companions to the more traditional presentation of Hungarian syntax found in Kenesei, Vago and Fenyvesi (1997), the most comprehensive reference grammar of Hungarian currently available to English speakers. [End Page 133] As part of the series Cambridge Syntax Guides, É. Kiss's new Syntax of Hungarian is essential to anyone interested in gaining an empirical grounding in the syntactic intricacies of a non-Indo-European language. The approach taken largely reflects the one used in a recent teacher's reference manual Új magyar nyelvtan (New Hungarian Grammar) bý E. Kiss, Kiefer and Siptár (1998), which presented the basic facts of Hungarian syntax on a more practical descriptive level. However, because this book was written in Hungarian, it has remained inaccessible to most generative grammarians. Following a brief introduction (Chapter 1, pp. 1–7), where the author explains the basic features of Hungarian grammar, each of the book's subsequent nine chapters covers a specific theoretical topic. The choice of topics is regulated in part by which facets of Hungarian sentence structure offer the greatest challenge to contemporary grammatical theories; but also by what topics were not covered in Kiefer and É. Kiss (1994), which, for example, devoted considerable space to issues of phrase structure. The new volume is oriented instead around pragmatic (discourse-related) aspects of sentence constituency. Two key chapters are devoted to components of the language's system of functional sentence perspective. Chapter 2 (pp. 8–26) discusses the fact that Hungarian sentences are fundamentally organised around a division between topic and predicate. Unlike English, the sentence subject need not fulfil the role of topic. This principle echoes the author's numerous earlier publications, and ultimately derives from the nineteenth-century linguist Samuel Brassai (1860, 1863–1865). Brassai was the first to discover that word order in Hungarian sentences is based on a division between a topic, which varies as to the actual phrase-structure element that fulfills it, and some predication about that topic. The discourse configuration of Hungarian sentence structure has major implications for a host of more specific syntactic features. Chapter 4 (pp. 77–104) deals with the role that focusing plays in configuring the order of elements within the predicate. Focused elements, as well as other verbal operators (question words, indefinite pronouns, etc.), obligatorily occupy the position immediately to the left of the finite verb itself. Some chapters appear to repeat material already covered in Kiefer and É. Kiss (1994). But this is actually not the case, since the new analysis is always directed at additional aspects of the problems, with an eye toward insights provided by recent theoretical advances. The author gives the appropriate credit for innovations she has adopted from other scholars in her acknowledgements (pp. xi–xii) and throughout the discussion, so that the reader can gain a broad understanding of the breadth of current investigations into Hungarian syntax. Coverage of the noun phrase (Chapter 7, pp. 151–180) adds a new discussion of noun phrase projections, the structure of possessive constructions, and non-possessor arguments in the noun phrase. The extensive coverage of subordination and coordination in the earlier book is supplemented here by additional treatment of relative and adverbial clauses, as well as by a discussion of parasitic gaps (Chapter 10, pp. 230–263). The remaining chapters explore additional structural principles that follow from the basic topic-predicate configuration within the Hungarian sentence. Chapter 3 (pp. 27– 76), entitled "The...