Hungarian Noun Research Articles

Analógia a jelölt mássalhangzó-kapcsolatra végződő, idegen eredetű főnevek tárgyesetében

This paper examines nouns of foreign origin with strongly marked consonant clusters at the end and how they behave when Hungarian native speakers inflect them for the accusative case. Un-like other Hungarian nouns (or what speakers reckon as Hungarian nouns), a significant part of Hun-garian native speakers add the accusative case marker to these nouns without a linking vowel (e.g. taps > tapsot [tɒpʃ] > [tɒpʃot] ‘applause, nom. > acc.’ but Hanks > Hankst [hɛŋks] > [hɛŋkst]) which is highly unexpected. The investigation took place within the model of analogical grammar. The gang of monomorphemic Hungarian nouns that end in the consonant clusters [ks], [ns], or [ps] facilitates the appearance of a linking vowel in recent words of foreign origin with three consonants at the end when Hungarian speakers inflect them for the accusative case. When, on the other hand, there is no linking vowel at the end of the nouns of foreign origin in the accusative, the gang that affects them comprises those Hungarian monomorphemic nouns which have non­branching codas with an [s] in them. There are three gangs that affect the nouns of foreign origin with two consonants at the end. The first one is where the branching coda’s first consonant is [r] or [l] and a linking vowel is required. The second and third gangs comprise Hungarian monomorphemic nouns that have non­branching codas with an [l] (in the case of the second gang) or with an [n] (in the case of the third gang). These two gangs allow their members to exhibit the absence of a linking vowel when they are in the accusative case.

A Possible Slavic Etymology of Hungarian kullancs ’tick’

The present article is dedicated to the etymology of the Hungarian noun kullancs ”клещ (lat. Ixodes ricinus)”. The Slavic origin of the word was assumed in the 19th century, however this idea was rejected in the 20th century owing to phonetic reseasons. After a short overview of the history of the research of this word, arguments are lined up in favour of the fact that the phonetic difficulties can be ignored or at least taken as irrelevant when comparing the Hungarian word kullancs with its Slavic equivalents. Therefore, it is inevitable to raise the question of its Slavic origin again.

Loanword integration: A case study of Kisbajom Romani

The article discusses a contact-induced change in the original pattern of loanword integration as well as in the original system of inflection of xenoclitic nouns in the Vend Romani dialect subgroup of the South Central dialect group. This innovative noun integration pattern is applied to recently borrowed Hungarian nouns. The article shows that certain inflectional forms of these loanwords, namely the accusative forms, deviate both from the original xenoclitic inflectional forms and from the corresponding inflectional forms in Hungarian. Thus, these loanwords are neither integrated into the original xenoclitic classes, nor do they involve borrowing the respective Hungarian nouns together with their inflectional suffixes. In addition, the article demonstrates that these nouns lack any adaptation whatsoever, whereby a new, Hungarian, stress pattern and phonetic realisation of certain phonemes is introduced into Vend Romani.

Hungarian Noun Phrase Extraction Using Rule-based and Hybrid Methods

We implement and revise Kornai's grammar of Hungarian NPs [11] to create a parser that identifies noun phrases in Hungarian text. After making several practical amendments to our morphological annotation system of choice, we proceed to formulate rules to account for some specific phenomena of the Hungarian language not covered by the original rule system. Although the performance of the final parser is still inferior to state-of-the-art machine learning methods, we use its output successfully to improve the performance of one such system.

Hungarian pronominal case and the dichotomy of content and form in inflectional morphology

Hungarian nouns take some seventeen or so suffixal case inflections, e.g. haz ‘house (nominative)’ ∼ haz-ban ‘in a house (inessive)’. Personal pronouns have corresponding case-marked forms but these are not formed by means of suffixal case inflections. Instead, postposition-like stems expressing the individual cases are inflected for each pronoun’s person and number in exactly the same way that nouns inflect for possessor agreement or true postpositions inflect for a pronominal complement (inessive benn-e ‘in him’, benn-uk ‘in them; cf. konyv-e ‘his book’, konyv-uk ‘their book’ from the noun konyv; mogott-e ‘behind him’, mogott-uk ‘behind them’ from the postposition mogott). This manner of case marking embodies a highly unusual pattern of ‘functor-argument reversal’, which is problematic for many models of morphosyntax. In our account of this phenomenon, we adopt the modification of Stump’s (2001) Paradigm Function Morphology proposed by Stump (2002); this modification (‘PFM2’) distinguishes form paradigms (expressing morphological properties) from content paradigms (expressing syntactic properties). We also distinguish absolute forms from (bound) conjunct forms of the case postpositions. Pronominal case forms are built on the case postpositions’ absolute forms and a rule of paradigm linkage that effects functor-argument reversal guarantees that their person-number inflection realizes the content of each pronoun.

Impaired language production in asymptomatic carotid stenosis

Abstract This article aims to investigate the possible impact of carotid stenosis, i.e., the atherosclerotic narrowing of the inner surface of the carotid artery, on language performance. The majority of patients with carotid stenosis are considered asymptomatic, as they have not experienced retinal or focal cerebral dysfunction. Here we challenge the traditional assumption that such patients are asymptomatic with regard to neurocognitive functions by demonstrating that chronic cerebral hypoperfusion may have a significant impact on language performance. Twenty-four patients with 50–99% asymptomatic carotid stenosis and 24 healthy controls participated in this study. Language performance was tested with an elicited production task, in which participants had to produce regularly and irregularly inflected Hungarian noun forms. The dependent variable was the amount of errors. Compared to healthy controls, patients with carotid artery stenosis demonstrated lower overall performance on the language production task. Additionally, patients with bilateral stenosis produced more errors than patients with unilateral stenosis. Importantly, patients with the lowest degree (i.e., 50%) of carotid artery narrowing already exhibited considerable language impairment. These results support the accumulating evidence that hypoperfusion secondary to carotid stenosis may be functionally relevant despite the so called ‘asymptomatic’ status of the patients. These findings also highlight the need for including neurocognitive assessment in the evaluation of the clinical status of these patients, and have potential therapeutic implications.

Entropy measures and predictive recognition as mirrored in gating and lexical decision over multimorphemic Hungarian noun forms

Our paper is an attempt to indicate the relevance of information theoretical accounts to understand word recognition and morphological processing in Hungarian, along with other studies using more traditional predictors like linear position and morphological composition. The first two experiments were gating studies. The effect of the decision points was only evident in frequent words. The correct recognition means for the recognition points differ from the means for one-before-recognition points, indicating that the recognition point follows a sudden drop of the entropy value. This shows how entropy measures can be used to predict word recognition in actual language performance. The next two experiments examined the word reconstruction effect. A clear bathtub effect (Aitchison, 1987) was obtained: reconstruction was highest in the cases where both the beginning and the end were correct. The last, lexical decision based study used four basic morphological types of markers (plural, second and first possessive) and three types of case (-nak,-ban-,-ra ?DAT, INSIDE, ONTO). The main effect of the frequency and the error type was significant. Frequent words were judged faster but less accurately, suggesting a trade-off. The later the mistake is, the faster and easier its rejection was.

Srpski ekvivalenti mađarske deverbativne imenice na-ás/-és

This study is devoted to the Serbian verbal nouns that mean action and its result and that are equivalent to the Hungarian nouns with suffix -as/-es . The author proves the inaccuracy of some ways of translation and offers alternative solutions.

The Syntax of Hungarian (review)

Reviewed by: The syntax of Hungarian by Katalin É. Kiss Marcel den Dikken and Anikó Lipták The syntax of Hungarian. By Katalin É. Kiss. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xii, 278. ISBN 0521660475. $70 (Hb). This excellent book is a wonderful kaleidoscope brimming with the phenomenal results of concentrated research conducted by a fairly small group of mostly generative linguists (primarily but not quite exclusively made up of native speakers of Hungarian) over the past three decades. The author herself has, from the outset, been one of the leading contributors to the study of Hungarian syntax, in many instances having been the first to study the key facts. Her scope over the empirical and scholarly playing field is admirable, and this book is an outstanding reflection thereof—not least because of her generous acknowledgment and candid discussion of other people’s work on the syntax of the language (and some of the semantics as well).1 What follows, including the critical remarks about the weaknesses of the book, should be read, therefore, against the backdrop of the three opening sentences of this review. Major highlights of the ten chapters include the very methodical and comprehensive overview of the topic-predicate structure of the Hungarian sentence (§§2.5–2.6); the excellent treatment of the difficult subject of agreement (§3.5); the careful handling of the empirical facts and skillful sailing between the head- and phrasal-movement accounts in the discussion of the (in)famous ‘verbal modifier’ (VM) and its aspectual role (§3.6);2 the concise and accessible survey of quantifiers and their syntactic properties (Ch. 5); the critical précis of the extensive literature on the structure of the Hungarian noun phrase (Ch. 7); the quick wrap of the intricate facts of verbal [End Page 777] clustering in Hungarian and their theoretical implications (§9.3);3 and the meticulous unraveling (Ch. 10) of the empirical and analytical intricacies of argumental and adjunct subordinate clause types, relative and adverbial clauses, their distribution in the matrix clause, and the role of sentential pronouns connected to them, a discussion which devotes much space to extraction possibilities out of CPs, so-called long operator movement, and detailed analyses thereof. And the cherry on top of it all is the nice little argument (§10.6) for a unified (‘forking’) chain approach to parasitic gap constructions, contra Chomsky’s (1986) Barriers. In addition, the book features discussions of the structure of the minimal predicate, focusing, negation, and the postpositional phrase. The book’s empirical coverage, therefore, is extensive; É. Kiss has done a remarkable job in making the sometimes extremely intricate facts, their analysis, and their theoretical consequences accessible to the generative syntax community at large.4 This book should thus serve as an outstanding starting point for anyone interested in but not yet intimately familiar with aspects of the syntax of Hungarian. In many sections, the level of detail of the discussion actually goes well beyond initiating the novice: though at the outset she states that it is the goal of her ‘empirical rather than technical approach . . . to present the theoretically relevant facts of Hungarian explicitly, but without necessarily providing accounts in terms of the most recent theoretical innovations’ (7), É. Kiss often actively engages in debates on controversial issues. A particularly striking example of this is her discussion (§4.2) of the well-known adjacency of a focused constituent and the finite verb in Hungarian. Focusing (in single-focus constructions) involves the obligatory fronting of the focused constituent to a position in the left periphery (SpecFP; Brody 1990) and placing the finite verb to the immediate right of the focused constituent. This immediately post-focus placement of the verb is commonly analyzed in terms of a Verb Second-like derivation: The focus raises into the specifier of a functional projection whose head comes to host the fronted verb. É. Kiss deviates from the mainstream in pushing an account that, instead of raising the verb to Foc0, stranding its verbal modifier in SpecAspP (1a), keeps both the verb and the verbal modifier in their base positions, inside the VP (1b).5 That the verbal modifier must follow the verb then follows from the assumption that, within...

Second stems in Hungarian nouns

In this paper we present a unified account of irregular noun stems (second stems) ) in Hungarian ; these stems are selected just in those cases where the noun combines with suffixes that have an initial non-moraic vowel (type III suffixes), regardless of the derivational or inflectional status of the suffix. The observed stem-suffix combinations turn out to be optimal under the assumption that underlyingly, the second stems have an unlinked mora and type III suffixes lack any moraic structure. The candidates that are evaluated by an ordered set of constraints are exclusively formed by the concatenation of stems and suffixes; all possible alternations result from options to be taken at the morpheme boundaries

Inflectional marking in Hungarian aphasics

How do aphasics deal with the rich inflectional marking available in agglutinative languages like Hungarian? For the Hungarian noun alone, aphasics have to deal with over 15 basic case markings and dozens of possible combinations of these basic markings. Using the picture description task of MacWhinney and Bates (1978), this study examined the use of inflectional markings in nine Broca's and five Wernicke's aphasic speakers of Hungarian. The analysis focused on subject, direct object, indirect object, and locative nominal arguments. Compared to normals, both groups had a much higher rate of omission of all argument types. Subject ellipsis was particularly strong, as it is in normal Hungarian. There was a tendency for Broca's to omit the indirect object and for Wernicke's to omit the direct object. Across argument types, Wernicke's had a much higher level of pronoun usage than did Broca's. Broca's also showed a very high level of article omission. Compared to similar data reported by Slobin (this issue) for Turkish, the Hungarian aphasics showed an elevated level of omission of case markings. Addition errors were quite rare, but there were 14 substitutions of one case marking for another. These errors all involved the substitution of some close semantic competitor. There were no errors in the basic rules for vowel harmony or morpheme order. Overall the results paint a picture of a group of individuals whose grammatical abilities are damaged and noisy, but still largely functional. Neither the view of Broca's as agrammatic nor the view of Wernicke's as paragrammatic was strongly supported.