Akadémia Kiadó

Edit Kádár: Nominal Predicates and the Copula in Hungarian

The present work aims to establish the syntactic structure of sentences involving nominal predication (of the predicational and identificational subtypes) - in the framework of generative linguistic theory, based on Hungarian data. The main problems to be clarified are: how sentences with a mere nominal predicate relate to those involving a nominal predicate and a copula (whether or not a hidden copula is also present in the former sentence type); what role the copula plays (whether it is a verbal element or the instantiation of a bundle of inflectional features); and if the predicational and identificational types of nominal sentences, distinguished on the basis of functional criteria, instantiate different syntactic structures. The analysis is based on the observation of various differences in the syntactic behavior of these two types, and the goal is to assign to the two sentence types structures from which the syntactic differences attested fall out automatically.