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Article published In: From and Towards Demonstratives: Grammaticalization processes and beyond
Edited by Veronica Orqueda and Berta González Saavedra
[Journal of Historical Linguistics 15:2] 2025
► pp. 292–314

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Demonstrative modifiers in Middle Hungarian

A complex picture of renewal

 | Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics.

Published online: 6 June 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.24019.ege
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Goals and research questions
    • 1.2Data and methodology
    • 1.3Background: On the emergence of the definite article
  • 2.Strategies for demonstrative modification: Old and new patterns
    • 2.1Reanalysis and renewal
    • 2.2The original construction with e(z)/a(z) ‘this/that’
    • 2.3Reinforcement Strategy I — with ezen/azon ‘this/that’
    • 2.4Reinforcement Strategy II — with ime(z)/ama(z) ‘this/that’
    • 2.5The determiner doubling strategy
  • 3.Empirical research and corpus data
  • 4.Formal representations
  • 5.Distributional differences and the outcome of the competition
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Primary sources
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