The Hungarian pro-drop possessive construction and the definite article

Abstract

The paper focuses on a lesser-explored phenomenon in Hungarian linguistics, i.e. the use of the definite article before Hungarian pro-drop possessive constructions. First a theoretical background is outlined for a framework of definiteness, familiarity, alienability, and subject–object asymmetry, and then, the findings of a corpus-driven research are presented. The results show that the (non-)appearance of the definite article can be attributed to a fine interplay of various factors, where the stronger often override the weaker. Our data suggest that pragmatic like issues such as voice (narrator’s text vs. characters’ dialogue), listing (enumeration), and salience (e.g. the ambiguity of the antecedent) play a major role in the appearance or vanishing of the definite article before Hungarian pro-drop possessive constructions. Of secondary importance are semantic issues related to alienability, namely mental-spiritual states, +human feature, and body parts; and last come the grammatical aspects of (preverbal or postverbal) sentence position, focus category, and having adnominal dependents (e.g. adjectives or determiners). It is also marked that lexical constructions may annul any of the above factors.