Journal of Uralic Linguistics - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2023

This paper explores to what extent lexical factors, such as minimal pairhood and wordedness, affect the realisation of laryngeal features of the word-final fricatives /s/ and /z/ in Hungarian in potentially neutralising contexts, and whether the observed acoustic differences are perceptually salient enough to distinguish underlying voicing in non-minimal pairs and in minimal pairs in semantically ambiguous contexts. We show that in devoicing contexts the contrast between /s/ and /z/ in minimal pairs is more likely to be upheld than in non-minimal pairs in production, and this difference seems to map onto perceptual contrast, also that complete neutralisation can be prevented in devoicing contexts by durational cues. In the voicing environment, the acoustic difference between the fricatives is less likely to map onto a contrast in perception, indicating neutralisation. In the devoicing context, little voicing is enough to categorise the fricative as voiced: listeners compensate for phonological changes that correspond to existing rules in their language rather than for those that are only coarticulatory in nature.

This paper presents an integrated approach to the morphosyntax of the three nominal plural markers of Hungarian: multiplicative -k, possessive -i, and associative plural -ék. It explicates the relationship between the associative and multiplicative plural markers, and between the associative plural and the anaphoric possession marker -é. Central in the analysis proposed is the hypothesis that the marker -é consistently plays the role of a predicational relator formally licensing the silence of one of the two terms in the predication relationship that it mediates. The syntax underlying the associative plural involves an asyndetic coordination relation in which the content of a silent plural pronoun is specified by a complex noun phrase headed by the silent noun group. The analysis has im-plications for the syntax of number and demonstratives and for the licensing of silent nouns and pronouns.

This paper examines the morphosyntax of (dis)sociative ‘with(out)’, with particular reference to the facts of Hungarian but with an eye towards universality. The morphological analysis of -stul/stül ‘with’ and -talanul/telenül ‘without’ unpacks these complex forms, utilizing a variety of morphemes treated as heads of phrases in the syntax; the syntax, in turn, represents (dis)sociatives as depictive secondary predications, with a PRO-subject controlled by either the subject or the object of the containing clause. The morphophonology and semantics of sociative -stul and dissociative -talanul unfold compositionally from the syntactic structure. The analysis of (dis)sociatives reveals the benefits of composing complex word-level formatives in syntax, shows that snowballing head movement and phrasal movement are two discrete strategies for syntactic word formation, and sheds new light on several grammatical formatives and their interactions.

This paper proposes an account of the interpretive effects of two discourse particles in Hungarian, talán and vajon, within the view of context and context change developed in Farkas & Roelofsen (2017), and shows that the restrictions on their distribution follow from their interpretive properties. Building on Gyuris (2022), talán will be treated as signaling epistemic bias in both declaratives and interrogatives. Following Farkas (2022), vajon will be treated as a non-intrusive question marker, which, in the account proposed, is incompatible with bias markers. The restrictions on the sentence types in which these particles occur, as well as the fact that there are restrictions on their co-occurence, will be derived from their interpretive contribution.

This paper provides the first formal account of the meaning of the pragmatic marker ejsze in the Székely (Szekler) dialect of Hungarian. Using standard diagnostics of sentence types, we argue that it is compatible with declaratives and constituent interrogatives but not with polar interogatives. We suggest that it makes a contribution analogous to that of German wohl in declaratives, and argue that its use-conditional meaning can be described along the lines proposed for wohl by Eckardt (2020). Accordingly, ejsze is analyzed as an inferential evidential, marking that the prejacent is defeasibly entailed by the maximal body of knowledge of the speaker. The paper discusses contrasts between the distribution and felicity of ejsze vs. wohl, and ejsze vs. talán, an inferential particle that appears both in the standard and in the Székely dialect.