Compounds and multi-word expressions in Hungarian
Ferenc Kiefer, Boglárka Németh · 2018
Compounds and multi-word expressions in HungarianThe notion of compounding is notoriously difficult to define and there are hardly any universally accepted criteria for determining what a compound is.In the present chapter we will make a distinction between prototypical compounds and non-prototypical compounds.The latter but not the former are syntactically separable.All compounds are right-headed and are inflected as a whole.Moreover, according to the received view compounds express a conceptual unit though it is not easy to define what exactly this means.Finally, typically only the first syllable of a compound bears stress.Compounding is a rather late development in the history of Hungarian.Though compounds can be found sporadically before the 18 th century, during the language reform (end of 18 th and beginning of 19 th century) new compounds were massively created partly by using existing patterns and partly by loans mainly from German.This explains why productive patterns of root (endocentric) compounds are -as far as the categories involved are concerned -identical in Hungarian and German. 1 The structure of our chapter is as follows: in the first part of the chapter we are going to provide an overview of productive compounding patterns, i. e. root compounds, morphologically marked compounds, deverbal compounds and coordinative compounds.Section 2 is devoted to the description of compound-like phrases in Hungarian, i. e. preverb + verb constructions and bare noun + verb constructions.Finally, Section 3 summarizes the main conclusions of the chapter. Prototypical compounds 1.Root compoundsLet us first have a look at root compounds.A root compound is a compound whose head is not deverbal or whose non-head does not have the function of argument of the verb from which the head is derived.The productive patterns 1 Sections 1.1 through 1.3 and 2.2 are heavily based on our earlier works on the subject.Cf., in