Hungarian demonstratives in contrastive contexts

This paper presents the results of corpus queries and a subsequent questionnaire study exploring the exophoric use of four Hungarian demonstratives ez/az 'this/that' and emez/amaz this/that other one' in contrastive contexts. Concordance analysis revealed that the aforementioned four demonstratives often occur in various patterns, such as ezamaz. Findings of the questionnaire study showed that in contrastive contexts, where two objects are placed either within or out of arm's reach in front of the speaker and addressee in table-top space on the sagittal axis, the acceptability of the emerging contrastive patterns does not depend on relative distance. This means that speaker proximity can be overridden by contrastive function in Hungarian.