Guest editors’ note

Abstract

. Having seen the success of WAS, we decided to explore ways to provide the presenters with an opportunity to publish their talks developed into papers in a peer-reviewed journal. In the spring of 2013, Acta Linguistica Hungarica accepted our proposal for two special volumes. The first volume, which contained papers on datives, and which was edited by our colleague, György Rákosi, was published in March 2014.The papers in this second volume all revolve around argument structure and event structure phenomena in a variety of languages: Dutch, English, Hungarian, Pazar Laz and Udmurt. The authors provide fresh perspectives on and offer novel data for several issues that are in the forefront of current linguistic investigation, and thus they can be of interest to linguists with various theoretical persuasions.In their paper How many theta roles in a reflexive verb?, Alexis Dimitriadis and Martin Everaert discuss reflexive verbs and argue for their being syntactically intransitive but semantically two-place predicates. In Transitivity in Pazar Laz, Eser Erguvanli Taylan and Balkiz Öztürk present arguments for the claim that all verbs in Pazar Laz have a transitive syntactic structure. In Towards an analysis of the causative/non-causative alternation in Udmurt, Orsolya Tánczos contributes to the discussion on the causative alternation by offering new empirical evidence for a nonderivational analysis. The paper The argument structure of Old Hungarian -t gerunds is exceptional in the sense that it is not based on a WAS presentation. It has been included because it fits into this volume thematically. In this paper, Éva Dékány develops a "mixed projection" analysis of a special gerundive construction.We are indebted to our reviewers for their substantial contribution to putting together this volume:

Possessing a process

“…Instead of treating the possessor function as semantically unrestricted in Hungarian (cf. Laczkó 1997), this paper adopts the symbolic thesis (Langacker 1987) and considers the possessor function as being polysemous. Therefore, ANC is treated as an extended schema, a construction distinct from other possessive structures.…”