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Part of
Approaches to Hungarian: Volume 16: Papers from the 2017 Budapest Conference
Edited by Veronika Hegedűs and Irene Vogel
[Approaches to Hungarian 16] 2020
► pp. 137–164

Word order effects of givenness in Hungarian:

Syntax or prosody?

| Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
| Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences | Pázmány Péter Catholic University

This pioneering study presents results from a forced choice experiment designed to investigate the favoured linear placement of given constituents within the post-verbal domain of Hungarian. Specifically, the experiment tested the preferred relative position of textually given topical adjunct phrases. The results indicate that speakers prefer to place topical given constituents in the immediately post-verbal position, preceding contextually new items in the clause final position. The paper makes the argument that the results are best explained by an interface approach that sees word order variation as driven by the prosodic marking associated with givenness.

Keywords: word order, post-verbal field, information structure, givenness, prosodic marking
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Givenness
    • 2.1Notions of givenness
    • 2.2The grammatical marking of givenness
  • 3.Background on Hungarian
    • 3.1Free word order in the post-verbal field
    • 3.2Givenness in Hungarian
  • 4.Experimental treatment
    • 4.1Methods and materials
    • 4.2Results
    • 4.3Discussion
  • 5.General discussion
    • 5.1Syntactic approaches
    • 5.2A prosodic approach
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 8 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/atoh.16.07sza
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