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Article published In: Approaches to Hungarian 19:
Edited by Edgar Onea and Balázs Surányi
[Journal of Uralic Linguistics 4:1] 2025
► pp. 51–78

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Williams Cycle effects in Hungarian

 | University of California, Los AngelesLos Angeles
Published online: 10 July 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jul.00037.egr
Abstract
A domain exhibits selective opacity if it is transparent to some operations but opaque to others. The Williams Cycle (Williams, Edwin Samuel. 1974. Rule ordering in syntax. PhD Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology., Williams, Edwin. 2003. Representation Theory. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2013. Generative Semantics, Generative Morphosyntax. Syntax 161:77–108. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) makes a connection between opacity and the structural size of embedded clauses: Syntactically smaller embedded clauses are transparent to more sub-extraction types than larger ones. This paper argues that various restrictions on cross-clausal movement in Hungarian can be accounted for in terms of the Williams Cycle. This novel support for the Williams Cycle is welcome since Hungarian is known for exhibiting many movement types landing at various heights (e.g. Horvath, Julia. 1981. Aspects of Hungarian Syntax and the Theory of Grammar. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.; É. Kiss, Katalin. 1987. Configurationality in Hungarian. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 3. Dordrecht: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Puskás, Genoveva. 2000. Word Order in Hungarian: The syntax of Ā-positions. Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; . 2008. Határozószók és mondattartományok [Adverbs and sentence domains]. Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 1051:163–192.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Egedi, Barbara. 2021. PPs as adjuncts. In Syntax of Hungarian: Postpositions and Postpositional Phrases, eds. Katalin É. Kiss and Veronika Hegedűs, 371–430. Amsterdam University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). Bounding can be overt: a long movement type landing lower in the matrix left periphery is blocked by constituents occurring high in the embedded left periphery. But bounding can also be covert: Even if clause-types (e.g. subjunctive vs. tensed) are not distinguished in the left-periphery, assuming these are of different sizes, their opacity-differences can be traced back to size-differences.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Overtly driven bounding as Williams Cycle
  • 3.Apparent counterexamples: Topics and quantifiers
  • 4.Covertly driven bounding: Subjunctive vs. tensed clauses
  • 5.Conclusion and Williams Cycle beyond movement
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
References (55)
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