V61.0037 The Syntax / Semantics Interface: Hungarian
Prof. Anna Szabolcsi
Spring 2004
M/W, 11:00AM - 12:15PM
Prerequisites: V61.0013 (Grammatical Analysis) or permission of instructor. V61.0004 (Intro to Semantics) is recommended but not required. 4 points.
Hungarian is known as a language that wears its semantics on its syntactic sleeve. Word order transparently identifies the topic and the focus of the sentence and disambiguates the scopes of operators like always, not, everyone, etc. This course studies Hungarian from the perspective of theoretical linguistics and asks what this language tells us about how the syntax/semantics interface works in universal grammar. It reviews the fundamentals of Hungarian morphology and syntax and discusses current literature. Not a language course.
The aim is to broaden the spectrum of courses that allow Linguistics majors and joint majors to pursue the advanced study of syntax and, to some extent, semantics. The study of Hungarian offers a unique opportunity to demonstrate how the theoretical concepts that students study in the required course Grammatical Analysis apply to an "exotic" language and shed light on how grammatical structure encodes semantic relations. The leading theory in linguistics being that grammatical structures are largely universal, the insights from Hungarian have direct relevance for the analysis of English and other languages.
Calendar:
Part I: Background |
|
| 1/21 | The syntax/semantics interface: introduction |
| 1/26 | The history of Hungarian |
| 1/28-2/2 | The Hungarian sound system, verbs, nouns, pronouns, prefixes |
Part II: Configurationality, topic, focus |
|
| 2/4 | The configurationality debate: the structure of VP and IP |
| 2/9 | Discourse configurationality: topic versus subject |
| 2/11 | Discourse configurationality: intonational/information focus |
| 2/18 | Identificational focus and FP in Hungarian |
| 2/23 | Focus in Catalan – student presentation |
| 2/25 | Another look at Hungarian identificational focus: Is there an FP? |
| 3/1 | Focus in Modern Greek – student presentation |
| 3/3 | A taste of field work: The first position in German |
Part III Quantifier scope |
|
| 3/8-3/10, 3/22 | Set theory, propositional and predicate logic |
| 3/24-3/29 | Quantifier scope in English |
| 3/31 | Logical Form |
| 4/5 | Scope in overt syntax |
| 4/7-4/19 | Quantifier scope in Hungarian |
| 4/21 | Possessor extraction and its interaction with topic, focus, and quantifier scope |
Part IV Student presentations |
|
| 4/26-5/3 | Presentation of student papers |
Readings:
Part I:
- Imro-Benko, eds. (1972), The Hungarian Language.
- Törkenczy (1996), Hungarian Verbs and Essentials of Grammar:
A Practical Guide
to the Mastery of Hungarian. McGraw-Hill/Contemporary Books.
Part II:
- É. Kiss (1998), Identificational focus vs information focus. Language 74.
- É. Kiss, ed. (1995), Discourse Configurational Languages, Oxford.
- É. Kiss (2002), The Syntax of Hungarian. Cambridge.
- Rooth (1992), A theory of focus interpretation, Natural Language Semantics 1.
- Horvath (2000), Interfaces vs. the computational system in the syntax of focus. In Bennis et al., eds., Interface Strategies. Amsterdam.
- Baltazani (1998), Focus in Greek. UCLA.
Part III:
- Allwood et al. (1972), Logic in Linguistics. Cambridge.
- Fromkin, ed., (2000), Linguistics: Semantics II. Blackwell.
- Szabolcsi (2000), Syntax of scope. In Baltin—Collins, eds., Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory. Blackwell.
- Szabolcsi (1997), Strategies for scope taking. In Szabolcsi, ed., Ways of Scope Taking. Kluwer.
- Kayne (1998), Overt vs. covert syntax. Syntax 1.
- É. Kiss (2002), The Syntax of Hungarian. Cambridge.
- Brody-Szabolcsi (2003), Overt scope in Hungarian, Syntax 6.
- Szabolcsi (1994), The noun phrase. In Kiefer—É. Kiss, eds., The Syntactic Structure of Hungarian.
Last Modified: May 29, 2004