An Examination of the Perennial Linguistic Dichotomies: Analogy–Anomaly, Form–Meaning, Paradigmatic–Syntagmatic, Synchrony–Diachrony in Contemporary Hungarian Case Grammar

Abstract

After the liberation of Hungarian linguistics in the 19th century from the restrictive descriptive paradigm of ancient and mediaeval times, dogmatizing the properties of the Latin language as omni-valid, Hungarian gram-marians seem to have gone on to adopt another doctrine that obscured certain essential properties of the semantic, morpho-syntactic and morphological structure of the Hungarian language. The case of the controversial so-called endingless accusative (cf. Várom a fiam ‘I am expecting my son’) reveals their methodological inclinations, which evidently favored an analogical, formal, paradigmatic and (implicitly) diachronizing approach at the expense of a balanced – and in the view of the author of this article more suitable – approach which would also take account of anomalous, semantic, syntagmatic and purely synchronic phenomena.