Empirical Perspectives on the Use of Hungarian Nominal Demonstratives

Deixis and the use of demonstratives have been widely studied across languages. The fundamental purpose of this book is to provide an in-depth account of the semantics and pragmatics of Hungarian nominal demonstratives. It explores why a speaker opts for a given demonstrative form in a particular speech situation and investigates how the meaning of a demonstrative interacts with contextual clues during the process of reference resolution. These questions are addressed from an empirical perspective; the study incorporates the results of experimental work and corpus-based analyses. This volume emphasizes the need to rely on various data sources obtained by diverse methods, including elicitation, corpus-linguistic, and experimental methods, to develop a comprehensive account of demonstrative use. The empirical findings reported contribute to our understanding of demonstrative practice as an interactional process between the speaker and the addressee; it is argued that demonstrative reference in Hungarian is a dynamic, highly context-dependent, interactive, and addressee-oriented process. This volume not only expands current approaches to the use of Hungarian nominal demonstratives, but it also offers new insights into demonstrative use in a language where this phenomenon has not previously been explored by empirical tools. The data collected and the research findings make a valuable contribution to the current international debate about the factors that govern the choice of demonstratives in different languages.