piñón: falling in paradise: verbs, preverbs, and reduplication in hungarian

abstract

This is about how one might analyze a small piece of Hungarian grammar to get the behavior of preverbs to fall into place. A preverb is roughly the equivalent of the English particle, though the inventory of preverbs in Hungarian is much larger than that of particles in English. All Hungarian preverbs are separable; they are "preverbs" precisely because their canonical position is immediately before the verb. The following presentation takes the form of a narration which has four main parts: crawling, standing, falling, out.

note

This is a (rather dramatically titled) handout for a talk that I gave in May 1991. The original file was a Word 4 for the Macintosh file which I converted to a PDF file (via a couple of intermediate steps) 15 years later. The conversion was a bit problematic, and I had to made some cosmetic changes in order to improve the result (moreover, the page breaks and certain other formatting details don't match those of the original). I've never developed this handout into a paper. :-(

As far as I'm aware, to this day not much has been written about reduplication in Hungarian. The interested reader might want to take a look at Ferenc Kiefer's "Prefix reduplication in Hungarian" (Acta Linguistica Hungarica 43, pp. 175–194, 1995/1996) for a morphosemantic approach that was developed later and independently of my morphosyntactic approach.

reference

download "Falling in paradise: verbs, preverbs, and reduplication in Hungarian" (handout, 21 May 1991)

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piñón: falling in paradise: verbs, preverbs, and reduplication in hungarian
last updated on 13 march 2006
christopher piñón (pinon@sdf-eu.org)

http://pinon.sdf-eu.org/covers/fp.html