Akadémiai Kiadó

The information encoded in individual words and their lists, in other words, the lexicon, have become increasingly important in the study of syntax and semantics. This book, which has grown out of an interuniversity project, concentrates on the contexts in which verbs occur in Hungarian.       The six papers in this volume aim at various aspects of verbal argument structure in this Finno-Ugric language, often investigated for its structural differences from Indo-European languages. Theory and description go hand in hand, levels of grammatical analysis from syntax to semantics and pragmatics are represented here, as well as schools such as Lexical-Functional Grammar, Principles and Parameters Theory, formal semantics, and radical lexicalism.       It is well-known how derivational processes can affect the number and types of arguments, so it is instructive to see how a highly agglutinative language derives nouns, or rather, complex nominals, from verbs. The properties of nonfinite verb-forms and auxiliares are interesting to syntacticians, while the peculiarties of determinerless nouns as verbal arguments to semanticists. Some of the mysteries of the implicit arguments of Hungarian verbs receive a pragmatic account here.       The contributors come from four universities in Hungary: Debrecen, Pécs, Szeged, and the new Catholic University at Piliscsaba.