Linguistics Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
6 April 2006

Peter Sherwood (SSEES UCL, London)
Does Hungarian have a future?

How is "future"; as an ontological or cognitive category mapped onto the grammar of Hungarian?  The exponents of futurity examined in this talk include the future-tense paradigm once found in some varieties of Hungarian (-andok/-endek, etc.), the praesens pro futuro, and the FOG-future (with some reference to the GO-futures of some European languages). Finally, it is suggested that there are two MAJD-futures in Hungarian, which deserve better recognition.   The presentation is "pre-theoretical" but not, it is hoped, unrigorous, in order to be both widely accessible and also offer ideas and data for a range of theoretical approaches.