Aspectual cognate objects in Hungarian

Abstract

This paper examines aspectual cognate objects in Hungarian. Its main contribution lies in the syntactic and semantic analysis of three classes of accusative pseudo-objects, which are literally not cognate with the prototypical unergative verb they accompany but are demonstrated to be non-subcategorized and non-thematic elements that have the same role and the same syntactic and semantic properties as aspectual cognate objects in languages where these nominals are both semantically and morphologically related to the verb. In addition, the paper fills a typologically unexpected gap, considering that Hungarian, as a strong satellite-framed language, is predicted to have aspectual cognate object constructions.