Result states in Hungarian

Result states are, broadly speaking, certain kinds of states that are caused by certain types of events, both of which share one or two (or possibly even zero) participants. In Hungarian, various verbs, e.g. kap ‘receive’, as well as various combinations of a preverb and a verb, e.g. zöldre fest ‘paint green’ (‘green.subl paint’), plausibly denote relations between events and result states. In this paper, I propose a semantic account of result states in Hungarian that takes seriously the idea that result states may be modied by temporal modiers ending in the sublative case sufx -rA, e.g. öt napra ‘for ve days’ (‘ve day.subl’), and argue that such modiers may have three readings in conjunction with result states: an actuality-based use, an intention-based use, and an incorporated use. Finally, I argue that the present account of result states is more successful than the treatments proposed by Gyuris (2003), Kiefer (2006), and Bende-Farkas (2007).

Published online: 08 December 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/atoh.12.05pin