Hungarian Generative Diachronic Syntax 2

Principal Investigator: Katalin É. Kiss

The aim of the project is to describe and analyze the syntactic changes observed throughout the written history of the Hungarian language, as well as to reconstruct the fundamental linguistic structural properties preceding the language monuments. We primarily examine Old and Middle Hungarian sentence structures and grammaticalization processes, with a particular focus on information structure, predication, aspectual system, subordination, determination, and quantification.

Another goal of the project is to expand the existing Old Hungarian corpus horizontally and vertically: firstly, by augmenting the database with additional Middle Hungarian sources, primarily with translations of the New Testament (by Károli Gáspár, Pesthi Gábor, Sylvester János, Heltai Gáspár, and Káldi György), and secondly, by providing linguistic annotations for all Old and Middle Hungarian translations of the New Testament (normalization, morphological analysis, and disambiguation). To extract linguistically significant data and facilitate more efficient data collection for linguistic research, we are enhancing the existing search interface with additional features.

Our project is a continuation of the Hungarian Generative Historical Syntax project, numbered 78074, which ran at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 2009 to 2014.

Duration: 2014-2018