Kardos Éva (Debreceni Egyetem)

On the semantics and syntax of situation aspect in Hungarian

This talk is aimed at identifying two telicity-marking strategies in Hungarian: (i) the object-marking strategy known from English and other similar languages and (ii) event maximalization (Filip 2008). In the case of the former, I will argue, in line with É. Kiss (2008) and Csirmaz (2008), that telic interpretations arise compositionally, thanks to the lexical semantics of the verb and its internal argument; in other words, telicity falls out of the semantics of various components within the VP (see also Verkuyl 1972, Tenny 1994, Krifka 1998, among others). In the case of the latter, however, (a)telicity, is the direct consequence of event-maximalizing particles and resultative/locative expressions (Kardos 2012, 2016). Crucially, I will propose that this latter effect arises in the syntax of the Hungarian sentence via a situation aspectual functional projection above the VP. Thus, an important cross-linguistic difference arises between English and Hungarian: Whereas telicity in the former can be looked at as a purely semantic effect, in the latter it is tied to both the semantics and the syntax.