Abstract

Mapping the meaning of Hungarian impulsative constructions

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Abstract

In Hungarian, the derivational suffix -hAtnék is used to create a noun that denotes an involuntary, often immediate urge to perform the action expressed by the root verb (e.g. ihatnék 'urge to drink'). Originally restricted to basic physiological impulses, this construction is now fully productive and extends freely to figurative and complex activities. We ask whether this semantic expansion is reflected in the statistical associations between the construction and its lexical fillers. Using the Hungarian portion of the HPLT 3.0 corpus, we obtain more than 12,000 impulsatives and examine them with two collostructional analyses. The first shows that the -hAtnék derivation preferentially attracts verbal bases denoting barely-controllable bodily, emotional, and social impulses. The second shows that the matrix verbs overwhelmingly frame the urge as an external force seizing the experiencer, or as something suppressed or fading. Together, these results characterize the impulsative in distributional terms and show how expressive meaning supports productivity and constructional reorganization.

Keywords: impulsative construction, Hungarian, collostructional analysis, HPLT Monolingual Datasets 3.0

How to Cite:

Kalivoda, Á., Malouf, R. & Ackerman, F., (2026) “Mapping the meaning of Hungarian impulsative constructions”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 9(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/scil.4021