Cover not available
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. 25–46

Anatomy of Hungarian aspectual particles

| University of Utah
| University of Utah

The paper explores a common core of meaning that various aspectual adverbials in Hungarian (including megint, ismét ‘again’, még ‘still’) share. It is proposed that there is a general definition for various aspectual elements related to times and events. We suggest that some components of those elements, including the scalar argument and the focus set, can vary – and this results in the different specific meanings. We assume that meaning is compositional and also address the complex form mégis ‘(concessive) still’ and other elements that appear to be synonymous with mégis.

Keywords: aspectual adverbials, focus, repetitives, additive particles, semantics, Hungarian, Hindi, Nepali
Article outline
  • 1.Overview
  • 2. Még
    • 2.1Temporal még
    • 2.2Comparative még
    • 2.3Marginality még
    • 2.4Additive még
  • 3.Templatic meaning
  • 4.Concessive mégis and additives
  • 5.Other accounts
  • 6.Extensions and summary
    • 6.1Repetitives
    • 6.2Crosslinguistic patterns
    • 6.3Summary
  • Acknowledgements
  • 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.16.02csi
References
Beck, Sigrid
2016 Discourse related readings of scalar particles. Proceedings of SALT 26, 142–165. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Benkő, Lóránd
(ed.) 1970 A magyar nyelv törtnéti-etimológiai szótára [A historical-etymological dictionary of Hungarian], vol 2. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.Google Scholar
Heim, Irene
2001 Degree operators and scope. In Caroline Féry & Wolfgang Sternefeld (eds.), Audiatur Vox Sapientiae. A Festschrift for Arnim von Stechow, 214–239. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.Google Scholar
Ippolito, Michela
2007 On the meaning of some focus-sensitive particles. Natural Language Semantics 15(1). 1–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Klein, Wolfgang
2007 About the German particles schon and noch. Ms, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Published in Klein, Wolfgang. 2018. Looking at Language, 283–323. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Krifka, Manfred
2000 Alternatives for aspectual particles: Semantics of still and already. Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 26(1). 401–412. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Michaelis, Laura A.
1993 ‘Continuity’ within three scalar models: The polysemy of adverbial still . Journal of Semantics 10. 193–237. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rooth, Mats
1985 Association with Focus. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts dissertation.
1992 Theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1(1). 75–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Slade, Benjamin & Aniko Csirmaz
under review. Pieces of Indo-Aryan and Hungarian adverbs. In Moreno Mitrović (ed.) Logical Vocabulary, Logical Change Amsterdam John Benjamins
von Stechow, Arnim
1996 The different readings of wieder “again”: A structural account. Journal of Semantics 13. 87–138. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Umbach, Carla
2009 Another additive particle under stress: German additive noch. Symposium on Logic and Language (LoLa) 10, 149–156. Budapest: HAS.
Zimmermann, Malte
2017 Scalar particles and contrastive topics in English and Vietnamese. In E. A. Bar-Asher Siegal (ed.), Proceedings of IATL 2015, 123–152. Cambridge, MA: MITWPL.Google Scholar