Hungarian auxiliaries revisited

Abstract

This paper uses a corpus linguistic approach to investigate finite verbs co-occurring with infinitives. It aims to explore a range of similar verbs along a set of formal-distributional features based on Kálmán C. et al.'s (1989) study. We used hierarchical agglomerative clustering to analyze the data. The analysis identifies four clusters, two comprising verbs more auxiliary-like than the others. The results of this experiment are broadly similar to those of Kálmán C. et al. (1989); however, we also find remarkable differences. Most importantly, the so-called stress-avoiding verbs are likely to occur between the preverb and its associated infinitive, indicating that they are much closer to central auxiliaries than previously assumed.