Hungarian in focus

(Received 26 November 2003; revised 31 August 2004)Katalin E´. Kiss, The syntax of Hungarian (Cambridge Syntax Guides).Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xii+278.La´szlo´ Varga, Intonation and stress: evidence from Hungarian. Houndmills:Palgrave MacMillan, 2002. Pp. xvii+229.La´szlo´ Hunyadi, Hungarian sentence prosody and universal grammar.Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002. Pp. 328.It seems it’s harvest time in Hungarian linguistics: a number of respectablepublishers have in recent years put out books on various aspects of theHungarian language by authors working in or outside Hungary. In additionto the monographs under review here, one can mention Szabolcsi (1997),Kenesei, Vago & Fenyvesi (1998), Koopman & Szabolcsi (2000) or Sipta´r&To¨rkenczy (2000).For some time now, Hungarian has been a language of marked interest tolinguists. It is a Finno-Ugric language, though after long cohabitation withotherlanguages,notablyTurkic,SlavicandGermanic,ithasshedsomeofitsgenuine Uralic features. For example, it has intriguing exceptions to itsvowel harmony, it has a prefixal preverb system not unlike that in German,andwhileitisahead-finallanguageinmanyrespects,mostofitsclausetypesdo not exhibit anything like head-final structures. And, last but not least,it is a so-called topic-prominent language, with a well-defined topic–focusstructure, which includes quantifiers, inducing Anna Szabolcsi toquip: ‘Hungarian is a language wearing its Logical Form on its sleeve’