Abstract
It has been common knowledge that the Hungarian complementizer hogy can only occur in finite clauses. Even though it started to occur c. 100 years ago in new contexts, such as in clauses accompanying sentence adverbials, nonfinite clauses were exempt from its occurrence. Recently, however, it began to be used in infinitival clauses. This squib offers an overview of related structures and initial analyses for its structure arguing that it fills a slot in a syntactic paradigm where verbs and adjectives can have both finite and infinitival complement clauses but nouns cannot since they only allow finite clauses. The new construction makes it possible for nouns to have infinitival complements, although with a twist: they must be accompanied by the finite complementizer thus making the resulting construction peculiar. We have also tested two populations by means of a questionnaire in order to investigate the acceptance scale of the construction as tabulated in the paper as based on an established statistical methodology.
The authors’ work was supported by Grant NKFIH 120073 (Kenesei) and NKFI FK-128518 (Szeteli). We wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.
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Notes
- 1.
We will forgo various ramifications related to scopal properties, for which see Szabolcsi (2009).
- 2.
The examples are due in part to László Kálmán (LK), who recorded them in conversations and with whom the first author discussed them at length, and in part to Bálint Sass, who helped us find them in the Hungarian National Corpus (HNC). See also Oravecz et al. (2014). We express our gratitude to both of them for their invaluable help. For lack of space few of the examples can be given here.
- 3.
- 4.
For reasons of space we have had to forgo reproducing here the list of sentences in the questionnaire; the glosses with the sense translations would have been too voluminous.
- 5.
The statistical analysis was performed using SPSS version 23.
- 6.
The contrast in the acceptability of (16a) and (16c) may be enhanced by an alternative reading of the sentence which, however, requires a different, so called contrastive topic intonation pattern (Hogy mindenkinek megmondani az /igazat, azon “gondolkodom. ‘As for telling everyone the truth, I am still thinking about it.’).
- 7.
We are grateful to Marianne Schiller for managing the experiment. It is to be noted that the two groups are, strictly speaking, not comparable because the pupils’ judgements are contrasted with not a random group of adults but a linguistically well-trained population, which is highly thoughtful in their assessments. This initial probe, however, was intended to barely be informed of the phenomena.
- 8.
Clustering the participants with respect to their grammaticality judgements produces a telling dendrogram, to which we will turn our attention in a different paper in the future.
- 9.
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Kenesei, I., Szeteli, A. (2022). Surprise: Nonfinite Clause with Finite Complementizer. In: Gervain, J., Csibra, G., Kovács, K. (eds) A Life in Cognition. Language, Cognition, and Mind, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66175-5_8
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