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In:Historical Linguistics 2023: Selected papers from the 26th International Conference on Historical Linguistics,Heidelberg, 4-8 September 2023
Edited by Jadranka Gvozdanović
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 371] 2026
► pp. 30–54

Outliers in language variation and change

Atypical users of the variants of negation in Old and Early Middle Hungarian

 | Hungarian Academy of Sciences
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
This chapter examines the history of sentence negation in Hungarian, focusing on variability and heterogeneity preceding change. The investigated variants of negation have coexisted since the earliest written document of substantial length (1370/1440), although their distribution changed significantly in the 19th century. The study analyses texts from three groups: Old Hungarian codices, Old and Middle Hungarian informal texts, and early Middle Hungarian New Testament translations. While the overall distribution of variants is similar across these groups, each contains an outlier. This chapter explores whether these outliers differ similarly from the majority or from each other, and if they foreshadow the 19th-century change. It concludes that although the reasons for the given texts to contain outliers vary, the patterns of variation are similar.
Article outline
  • 1.Orderly heterogeneity and outliers
  • 2.Background: Negation in the history of Hungarian
    • 2.1Negation in modern Hungarian
    • 2.2Negation from a diachronic perspective
    • 2.3Zooming in on the earlier distribution of the patterns
  • 3.Methods
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Old Hungarian codices and the so-called Hussite corpus
    • 4.2The Early Middle Hungarian sources and the outliers within
      • 4.2.1Károlyi’s Bible translation
      • 4.2.2The Kolozsvár trials
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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