Abondolo, Daniel Mario: Hungarian inflectional morphology - Bibliotheca Uralica 9. (Budapest, 1988)
ABONDOLO, D. M. HUNGARIAN INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY This book, a revised version of the author’s doctoral dissertation (Columbia University), offers a thorough and internally consistent analysis of the inflectional morphology of Hungarian. The general linguist will be interested in its fusion of the stronger elements of the generative and cataloguing approaches to grammar: although parsimonious both with rules and with the underlying units which trigger them, the work is generous with data—aiming at exhaustiveness—since it is the distributional facts of Hungarian which usually settle a given issue. Underlying forms are rendered in a majuscule MORPHOPHONEMIC CODE (Floyd Lounsbury’s “agglutinating analog”) which embodies all segmentables immanent in the perceivable substance. Such underlying forms, once postulated and exploited for their exegetical usefulness, are not jettisoned or ignored, but are kept continually in view as further forms are postulated. Those interested specifically in Hungarian will be stimulated by the book’s data-oriented approach and discussions of topics such as: the recoverability of Hungarian’s 14, 15, or 18 vowel phone(me)s from 5 abstract units, and the status of j, V and A (Chapter I); concentric personmarking and societal/stylistic valences in person suffix selection in the verb (Chapter II); the predictability of epenthetic e, о and a in iker, titok, and ajak; and the unique position, within the case system, of the superessive (Chapter III). Remarks on deixis and a glimpse into some problems raised by derivation conclude the work (Chapter IV). Daniel Abondolo is Lecturer in Hungarian Language and Literature at the University of London (School of Slavonic and East European Studies). AKADÉMIAI KIADÓ BUDAPEST