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Finno-Ugric languages and linguisticsVol. 8. No. 2. (2019.)

Tartalom

  • Editorial1en [56.05 kB - PDF]EPA-02403-00013-0010

Articles

  • Pauli Brattico :

    Finnish word order is relatively free when compared with several Indo-European languages. This article reviews the literature and finds three existing hypotheses concerning the origin of the phenomenon: (1) the nonconfigurationality hypothesis, according to which Finnish lacks syntactic structure, either partially or fully; (2) the movement hypothesis, according to which the wide range of word order permutations are produced by movement; and (3) the adjunction hypothesis, according to which thematic arguments can be attached to the phrase structure as adjuncts and behave syntactically like adverbs. Of these three hypotheses the nonconfigurationality hypothesis finds no empirical support and is rejected. A hybrid model, according to which the word order results from both movement and adjunction, is considered to best account for the facts.

    Keywords: Finnish, word order, discourse-configurationality, configurationality, adjunction

  • Ágnes Bende-Farkas :

    The first aim of this work is to provide an explanation to an exotic-looking expression used in Transylvania and in the Csángó regional variant of Hungarian. Az egészen lit. ‘the whole-N’ is synonymous to mind ‘all (from a given set)’. This expression is shown to be the product of a grammaticalisation process starting with egész ‘healthy’, ‘whole’, ‘complete’. This was to be expected, as such processes have occurred in several languages, and there is even an ongoing process in present-day German (Haspelmath 1995). Historical records have provided the missing links between the adjective egész and the operator az egészen. Records have revealed that this process in fact followed two diverging tracks, which is a finding of theoretical, as well as empirical, interest. One of these tracks characterises the entire Hungarian linguistic community, and only the last stages of the second track (az egész as a universal determiner of count nouns) are confined to Transylvania and the csángó variant. Yet another track we discovered was the reanalysis of adverbs derived from egész: some of these adverbs entail a so-called individual-oriented reading (paying the money in full entails paying all the money). Such readings could have facilitated the emergence of today’s az egészen, but they are also relevant in their own right.

    Keywords: grammaticalisation, diachronic semantics, quantification.