The essives in Hungarian

This chapter presents an empirical study of the distribution of the three essive markers in Hungarian on the basis of a linguistic questionnaire that captures the contexts in which essive and translative markers may occur in the Uralic languages. The study specifically investigates the opposition between permanent and impermanent state in non-verbal predications. The linguistic domains involved are non-verbal main predication, secondary predication, complementation, and manner, temporal, and circumstantial adverbial phrases. The use of the essives (associated with state) is contrasted with the use of the translative (associated with change). Finally, the syntactic position of elements marked by an essive is discussed in relation to the position of focus constituents.