MAGYAR IGEVONZATOK SZERB KÖZEGBEN
HUNGARIAN ARGUMENTS IN A SERBIAN ENVIRONMENT

Summary/Abstract: The language of the Hungarian minority living in the Carpathian Basin is influenced, to a greater or lesser extent, by the majority language. Thus, it is not uncommon for this language (or these varieties) to differ from the Hungarian spoken in the mother land and the rules of the dominant language to operate on all levels of the minority language, especially in the lexicon. Based on the production of Hungarian pupils in Vojvodina, the present study examines the influence Serbian, as the majority language, exerts on Hungarian in the domain of verbal arguments. Namely, even though children acquire the structures of their native tongue by the age of 10–12, they may start using them in a manner which departs from the norm of the native tongue under the influence of the language of their environment (the majority language), which may lead to a change in the system of the native tongue. The aim of the study is to establish (1) the extent to which the selectional properties of Serbian verbs influence the selectional properties of Hungarian verbs when the verbs require a different argument structure (in terms of selectional properties and case assigned to the arguments), (2) whether the extent of this influence is the same in the language use of primary and secondary school pupils and university students, and (3) which factors are responsible for the observed interference of the grammars of the two languages (especially in terms of the case assigned to the internal argument). The research is based on a survey conducted in Novi Sad, Serbia with Hungarian monolingual and Hungarian-Serbian bilingual pupils and university students. The survey contained 19 randomly ordered sentences with verbs which have a different argument structure in Hungarian and in Serbian, e.g. in Hungarian the verb requires a direct object argument, whereas in Serbian it requires an indirect object or vice versa. The arguments were given in parentheses (in Nominative) and the subjects were required to supply the correct form of them, depending on the sentential context.The results of the research indicate that the influence Serbian exerts on Hungarian in the domain of verbal arguments is indirectly proportional to the age of the respondents, since the number of responses deviating from the norm of Hungarian tends to decrease with age, both in frequency and in graveness. However, such a result is largely the consequence of the distribution of the informants, which could not be controlled for in this study. Therefore, further research is needed to confirm the results of the present study.

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