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Research Group for Theoretical Linguistics

     Chair: Zoltán Bánréti, Senior Research Fellow

     Research Coordinator: Kinga Gárdai

     E-mail: kinga@nytud.hu

     Phone: (36-1) 3214-830/179

Research Projects

Selected Publications

Staff

RP

Research profile

The research team of the department considers its main responsibility to be the investigation of synchronic language systems by applying approaches to be considered structuralist in  the broad sense of the term (including the generative approaches). They study all subsystems of the grammar (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and the lexicon) and their interfaces from theoretical, descriptive, and computational linguistic perspectives. Outside the borders of grammar, they restrict their attention to the study of fields which show the promise of bringing about substantial discoveries regarding the above subdomains, like pragmatics, cognitive approaches, or language typology. The object of the descriptive work and the source of theoretical innovations is mostly, but not exclusively, the linguistic phenomena of Hungarian. 

It is the members of the department who established the Department of Theoretical Linguistics of Eötvös Loránd University in 1989 and have operated it ever since. This organisational unit is responsible for running the BA, MA and PhD-programs in Theoretical Linguistics, and several undergraduate minor programs in linguistics.

Current research topics

The longest project based at the department (but carried out partly by affiliated researchers from all over Hungary) has been concerned with the production of A Structural Grammar of Hungarian, and was launched in 1979. The different phases of the research (each lasting for several years), have all applied the perspective and methods of contemporary linguistics to describe different subsystems of the grammar of Hungarian. The results have been published in scholarly papers along the way, but each phase was concluded with the publication of a volume summarizing the findings about the particular submodule, intended not only for scholars of linguistics, but also for the general public. All phases of the project so far have won the support of the National Scientific Research Fund (OTKA). Having completed the volumes about syntax, phonology, and morphology, the project is now in the final phases of describing the lexical subcomponent of the grammar, that is, the lexicon.

The most significant projects of the last couple of years, which have received financial support from different research grants, included a computational linguistic research project aiming to develop linguistic applications of the so-called generalized inheritance networks (GIN); the application of non-transformational, declarative linguistic theories (Lexical-Functional Grammar, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Categorial Grammar, etc.) to the study of various phenomena in Hungarian, and the familiarization of the professional audience with them; the investigation of the structure of the lexicon using a declarative (unification-based) approach; the study of the interaction of event structure and operator structure in the Hungarian sentence (investigating the impact of event structure on the communicational structure of the sentence and the impact of verbal prefixes and elements with a similar behaviour on the aspectual properties of the sentence); and a research on the structured lexicon in phonology and morphology. Several projects contributed to raising the efficiency of teaching, like the project aiming to develop new courses on algebraic semantics and laboratory phonology (assisted by a grant from CEU); the project assisting various forms of professional co-operation between the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics (UIL-OTS, Utrecht University) and the lecturers and students at the department; the production of A Descriptive Grammar of Hungarian, with the active participation of undergraduate and doctoral students; and the activities of a working group, also containing undergraduate and doctoral students, which aimed at developing a course on Hungarian language for secondary schools applying a modern perspective on grammar.

The current research of the members of the department concentrates on the following issues. In the domain of (morpho)phonology, they investigate analogical relations in the morphophonology in Hungarian, contrast surface-oriented and statistical analyses of types of allomorphy, study the role of paradigm structure in morphophonology, apply the methods of laboratory phonology to the analysis of phonological problems from a cross-linguistic (Hungarian, Slovak) perspective, conduct empirical studies on the intra-speaker and inter-speaker variation regarding vowel harmony in Hungarian (in collaboration with the University of California, Los Angeles), in addition to carrying out systematic descriptive investigations of Hungarian morphophonology. Morphological research concentrates on theoretical issues, like that of the properties of morphological constituents, elements, levels, mophological categories, and problems of categorisation.

In the domain of syntax, one research project focuses on the syntactic and semantic questions of adverbial modification, like the position, interpretation, and prosody of adverbials and adverbial clauses, and the properties of specific types of adverbials (e.g., comitatives, evidentials, temporal adverbials). It studies the interaction of adverbial modification and aspect, adverbial modification and focus, adverbial modification and quantification, as well as the properties of obligatory adjuncts; their interaction with event structure and focus. Another project is centered on the question of symmetry in syntax, and proposes the elimination of minimalist (and other) asymmetrical structure building concepts, a bare checking theory, involving agreement without probes and goals, and investigates the statuses of long distance dependencies (including ’movement’) in a minimally defined phrase structure. A third project examines the division of labor between linguistic subsystems (esp. syntax, semantics, prosody, and processing) that underlies some of the central locality restrictions on non-local dependencies that are manifest at the level of syntax (the Subject Island Condition, various kinds of weak islands, the Head Movement Constraint etc). The project advocates the radical view that the syntactic component itself includes no dedicated locality conditions at all on possible dependencies. Other topics pursued currently include the application of an anti-lexicalist approach to Hungarian morphosyntax; the investigation of the syntax of finite and non-finite subordination and of negation; and the study of the syntax of the scope interactions between quantifiers, wh-phrases, bare indefinites, and focus in Hungarian and cross-linguistically (particularly in East-Asian languages).

One project in semantics focuses on foundational issues like the conditions for having a type-free natural language semantics without functors and operands, the problems it presents for the semantics of quantifiers, and its repercussions on the issue of the complexity of semantics. The other research, which heavily relies on experimental data, is concerned with the question of how prosody and discourse context interact with interpretation as far as quantificational expressions and discourse particles are concerned. Some researchers are also involved in a computational linguistics project using data-mining techniques in machine-learning. Additionally, the department has been cooperating with the Department of Neurolinguistics and Psycholinguistics with the aim of creating a descriptive grammar of the Boyash language.

Last modified: 04.05.2010

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