Contrastive Uses of Hungarian Demonstratives
Empirical Perspectives on the Use of Hungarian Nominal Demonstratives - Enikő Tóth
Enikő Tóth [+]
University of Debrecen
Description
Chapter 4 first explores contrastive uses of demonstratives. By applying the demonstrative questionnaire developed by Wilkins (1999), it examines the role of two factors in demonstrative practice in table-top space: relative distance and contrastiveness. The findings show that in the case of non-contrastive exophoric uses of Hungarian nominal demonstratives in limited space where the speaker and the addressee have the same perspective of their physical surroundings, demonstratives code distance opposition (near and far), namely, the table-top space is divided into a speaker-anchored, interactional proximal region, and a distal region, which governs demonstrative choice. The findings for contrastive uses support the conclusion reached by Tóth et al. (2014), i.e., both proximal and distal demonstratives occurred in the interactional proximal region, thereby providing converging evidence for the generalisation made by Levinson (2018a) that contrastive uses across languages overwrite proximity distinctions. Another important finding of the elicitation study is that in Hungarian not only ez/az ‘this/that’, but the so-called emphatic or reinforced nominal demonstrative terms emez/amaz ‘this/that’ are also used contrastively. The second part of Chapter 4 investigates the functions displayed by the emphatic demonstratives (emez/amaz) by presenting the outcome of a corpus-based analysis of their nominative occurrences in the Hungarian National Corpus. The results demonstrate that although emez/amaz are generally considered marginal, they can fulfil a wide range of pragmatic functions. Furthermore, it is also shown that the demonstratives in question are inherently contrastive, that is, the suggestion made by Laczkó (2009) that the core meaning of emez/amaz is ‘this/that other one’ has been confirmed by empirical observations.