C ONSTRUCTIONS AND THEIR P OSSIBLE H UNGARIAN E QUIVALENTS
1. A prototypical example
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4. verbs of accompanied/unaccompanied physical transfer: Jack slid Jill a banknote under the table.
5. verbs of unaccompanied physical transfer: Jack sent Jill a Valentine card.
6. verbs of instantaneous causation of ballistic motion: Jack headed Jill the ball.
7. verbs of transfer of a message: Jack told Jill the good news.
8. verbs of instrument of communication: Jack faxed Jill the documents.
9. verbs of future having: Jack promised Jill a new fur coat.
10. verbs of refusal: Jack refused Jill a new diamond ring.
FOR-verbs:
11. verbs of creation: Jack built Jill a new house.
12. verbs of artistic creation and performance: Jack sang Jill a love song.
13. verbs of getting: Jack ordered Jill a glass of champagne.
14. verbs of preparation: Jill poured Jack a drink.
The order in which the different classes are presented is intended not to be accidental but to reflect the degree of motivation licensing their use in the two constructions at issue, moving from the central to the more peripheral members. At the top of the list, in the first place among verbs referring to actual transfer, we find the prototypical case of verbs of giving, inherently signifying acts of giving (Levin 1993:45). They can be defined as ones denoting the direct transfer of an object to an individual denoted by the indirect object phrase, where neither the transfer nor the transferred object is necessarily physical. The individual denoted by the subject is the initiator of the transfer, the entity denoted by the direct object is the thing transferred and the individual denoted by either the indirect or the prepositional object is the recipient. The central member of the class is give, which is a three-place predicate so the three participants of the situation appear at the level of subcategorisation as arguments of the verb.
This indicates that its lexical semantics is identical with the semantics of the double object construction.
This list offers the possibility of forming subgroups among the classes. The prototype is represented by Class 1. The members here are three-place predicates, i.e. verbs which profile actions with three participants. They exemplify metaphorical extension from caused motion (transfer of object) to transfer of possession. In the ditransitive construction they denote successful transfer. Classes 2-6 form a subgroup on the basis of the fact that the verbs listed in these groups all denote some kind of physical transfer and they do not necessarily denote transfer of possession. Classes 7 and 8 share the semantic property that they are communication verbs. The participation of the members of these classes in the dative shift is licensed through the conduit metaphor. Verbs of future having are either verbs of giving with associated satisfaction conditions (e.g. guarantee, promise, owe) or they express giving permission (permit). Verbs of refusal bear the relation of negation to the ditransitive construction (‘cause not to have’).
FOR-verbs refer to the intention of transfer. Here classes 11, 12 and 14 are related semantically through denoting creative acts. Their participation in the dative shift is licensed by the metaphor: ‘Acts that are performed for the benefit of a person are objects which are given to that person.’ Classes 11 and 12 are more closely related in the respect that their members denote actions which result in the creation of an entity that has not existed before.
Class 14 consists of verbs that denote actions which change the state of an already existing entity.
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1.1 The double object (ditransitive) construction
This construction puts the transferred object and the end point of transfer in focus and by the juxtaposition of the NPs denoting Recipient and Theme, it implies the success of transfer, that is, that the recipient has the object in his possession or at his disposal, and in the case of the prototypical GIVE-verbs, it implies that a volitional human agent transfers a concrete or abstract entity to a human recipient.
Following Goldberg (1995), the semantic, pragmatic and syntactic properties of the double object construction can be summarised in a diagram form as follows. The first line shows the semantics associated with the construction indicated. PRED marks a variable that is filled by the verb when a particular verb is integrated into the construction. Solid lines indicate which roles specified by the construction are obligatorily fused with roles of the verb.
Sem CAUSE-RECEIVE < agt rec pat >
PRED < >
Prag focus
Syn V SUBJ OBJ OBJ2 Figure 1
If we examine the Hungarian equivalents of the prototypical case of the verbs of giving, we can find that there are several possibilities of translation:
(2) Jack gave Jill a rose.
(a) Jóska adott Julinak egy szál rózsát.
Jóska ad/ott Juli/nak egy szál rózsá/t.
Jack give+3SgPast indet Jill+dat a rose+acc (b) Jóska odaadott Julinak egy szál rózsát.
Jóska oda/ad/ott Juli/nak egy szál rózsá/t.
Jack pre-verb (’there’)+give+3SgPast indet Jill+dat a rose+acc (c) Jóska egy szál rózsát adott Julinak.
Jóska egy szál rózsá/t ad/ott Juli/nak.
Jack a rose+acc give+3SgPast indet Jill+dat
(d) Jóska Julinak egy szál rózsát adott.
Jóska Juli/nak egy szál rózsá/t ad/ott.
Jack Jill+dat a rose+acc give+3SgPast indet
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(e) ?Egy szál rózsát adott Jóska Julinak.
Egy szál rózsá/t ad/ott Jóska Juli/nak.
A rose+acc give+3SgPast indet Jack Jill+dat
In the gloss of the Hungarian examples, the codes det/indet refer to the two types of Hungarian verbal inflections, the first marking the definiteness of the object referent on the verb while the second is used in the case of intransitive verbs or for transitive verbs taking objects with indefinite referents.
All these five Hungarian sentences are able to convey different meanings while remaining within the bounds of the cognitive construal mentioned. The most remarkable syntactic coding feature of sentence (a) is the juxtaposition of the Recipient and Theme NPs, iconically highlighting the possession relationship between the referents arising as a result of transfer. This is corroborated by the fact that in Hungarian, the same suffix –nak/-nek also appears in a marked form of the Possessive Genitive (cf. Juli/nak a rózsá/ja ’Jill’s rose’), when the possession relation is not only marked on the NP denoting the possessed thing with a suffix showing the person and number of the possessor but also on the NP denoting possessor. Similarly, as the language lacks a habeo-verb, its forms carrying the possessive suffixes showing the number and person of the possessor appear in the equivalents of English sentences like I have a new car. – Nekem új autóm van. Sentence (b) uses a deictic pre-verb (oda) with spatial meaning, which exists as an independent adverb, as well, and which also acts as an intensifier and corroborates the idea of successful transfer. While oda implies movement away from the discourse participants, its pair, ide refers to movement towards the speaker. In the case when there is a first person singular or plural Recipient, the deictic preverb ide may even absorb the meaning of the dative NP, making it optional:
(3) Ide/ad/ná/d (nek/em/nek/ünk) a só/t?
preverb+give+cond+Pr Sg2 det (dat+Poss Sg1/dat+Poss Pl1) the salt+acc
’Would you give me/us the salt?’
What makes sentence (c) a felicitous equivalent of the English sentence is its word order feature following the rule of Hungarian focus, i.e. that the focussed element typically stands before the verb in Hungarian (Kiefer 1992). In this way, sentence (c) puts the focus on the same participant of the event as the English sentence does. Sentence (d) has the same focus feature as sentence (c) as well as the juxtaposition of Recipient and Theme NPs. Sentence (e) also shares this focussing feature, which is corroborated by the sentence-initial position of the relevant NP. I have marked it with a question mark as it is probably more like the equivalent of an English cleft construction It was a rose that Jack gave to Jill.
1.2 The prepositional object construction
For the prepositional construction, which highlights the path on which the transferred object moves and thus also the fact that the transfer takes a certain amount of time, and encodes the possibility that the object will not be transferred to the recipient because there may be
’obstacles’ on the path (see e.g. Panther 1997), the possible Hungarian equivalent can be the following:
147 (4) Jack gave a rose to Jill.
(a) Jóska Juli/nak ad/ott egy szál rózsá/t.
Jack Jill+dat give+3SgPast indet a rose+acc
This matches the English sentence by virtue of putting the focus on the Goal/Recipient NP.
However, a notable difference is that while the preposition to often appears with one-dimensional locational meaning in the English language, the original locational-directional meaning is much more marginal, although present and historically original in the case of the suffix –nak/-nek in Hungarian (cf. Délnek fordul.’It turns to the south.’, Falnak ment. ’It bumped into the wall.’ – examples taken from Akadémiai magyar értelmező szótár). Another relevant consideration may be that it is not a separate element in Hungarian like its counterpart in English. Therefore, the mental tracking of the path on which the transferred thing moves seems to be put into the foreground to a lesser extent than in the English sentence.
Goldberg uses the diagram given as Figure 2 below to illustrate the process of metaphorical extension (1995:93) at work in this case. It presents the prepositional construction as a subset of a more general one which can be termed Caused Motion construction. In comparison with Figure 1, in this figure, dashed lines indicate roles which are not obligatorily fused with roles of the verb, that is, roles which can be contributed by the construction. This is how the diagram provides for the case when two-place predicates appear in a construction involving three participants.
As can be seen from the verb classification in section 1, while in English, there is a large number of verb groups the members of which participate in the dative shift, commonly divided into TO-verbs and FOR-verbs on the basis of which prepositional construction they participate in, this is lacking in Hungarian. The syntactic coding for both Recipient/Goal and Beneficiary (intended recipient) NPs is prototypically basically the same: the suffix -nak/-nek although there are also postpositions originating from independent nouns carrying a possessive suffix referring to a Sing3 possessor and a sublative adverbial suffix, used to denote the Beneficiary or intended recipient: részére, számára ’for, for the benefit of’
(examples taken from Akadémiai magyar értelmező szótár):
(5) (a) Ez/t Toncsi részére hoz/tam.
This+acc Tony for bring+PastSg1 det
’I have brought this for Tony.’
(b) Ki/nek a számára tet/ték félre?
Who+dat def.art for reserve+Past Pl3 det pre-verb
’Who is it reserved for?’
Example (b) shows that there may be double marking as the postposition is here combined with a pronoun carrying the dative case suffix, as well.
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Caused-Motion Construction Transfer of object
Sem CAUSE-MOVE < cause goal theme >
PRED < >
Syn V SUBJ OBL OBJ
IM: Transfer of Ownership as Physical Transfer
Transfer-Caused-Motion Construction Transfer of ownership
Sem CAUSE-RECEIVE < agt rec pat >
PRED < >
Prag focus
Syn V SUBJ OBL OBJ Figure 2