Demonstrative modifiers in Middle Hungarian
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This paper describes and analyzes the renewal of the demonstrative system in Hungarian, concentrating on the competing strategies of the Middle Hungarian period. After the definite article had grammaticalized in Hungarian, the demonstrative system renewed via two different strategies: reinforcement strategy and determiner doubling. The old and new strategies are introduced in the first, more descriptive part of the study, which is followed by an empirical investigation based on digitized historical corpora. Numerical evidence can show the measure of their spread as well as the change in their ratio. A coherent model of the syntactic change is also provided through formal representations of each structure under discussion. Finally, exploring the distributional properties of individual patterns in Middle Hungarian allows for the formation of a hypothesis about the upcoming outcome of their competition.
Author: Barbara Egedi
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4411085704