Types and functions of insubordinate complement clauses with hogy ‘that’ in Hungarian

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to give a constructional typology, on the basis of a corpus study, of the semantic types of Hungarian insubordinate clauses introduced by the complementizer hogy ‘that’, along with discussing the difficulties of their identification and description, especially the problems raised by the multiple part-of-speech affiliation of hogy (interrogative pronoun, conjunction, particle). In Hungarian, as in other languages, stand-alone versions (wishes, evaluations) that are both syntactically and pragmatically independent can fundamentally be told apart from pragmatically non-independent elaborative clauses (with and without discourse markers). However there are transitional cases between those two extremes (mixed stand-alone-elaborative clauses), as well as within the types (wishing evaluative clauses). In terms of their sentence type affiliation, too, several insubordinate variants exist that can be seen as mixed instances (curses). Pure and transitional cases were separated according to the following parameters: constructional semantic type, structural features (sentence type, verb mood, exaggerative particle is present or not), discourse markers is present or not. Furthermore, transitional cases can arise due to the existence of constructions that exclusively occur with interjections or sentence adverbials, whereas in other types the use of these items is optional. The pragmatic functions of insubordinate constructions are dominantly uniform on the basis of questionnaire studies conducted with native participants: they express emphasis or are highly loaded emotionally.