The Even Yearbook 15 (2022)

This is the 15th volume of The Even Yearbook that the Department of English Linguistics at Eötvös Loránd University has published in every even-numbered year since its establishment in 1994. The papers that made it into this volume are few in number, but we believe worthy of attention.

As always, the volume contains working papers by staff and PhD students of the department. Attila Starčević looks at the pronunciation of Early Modern English. The curiosity of the paper is that it is based on a 1664 grammar written in Latin by a Hungarian, György Komáromi Csipkés. Zoltán G. Kiss shows by production experiments that a lexical factor, homophony avoidance influences the degree of voicing in contexts where voicing assimilation should neutralize the contrast in Hungarian. Mark Newson and Krisztina Szécsényi argue that English has a nuetral case system like Chinese in that only unmarked case is assigned. Pronouns, which seem to show a nominative-accusative pattern actually show contextually determined realisations of this case. This view leads to a reappraisal of the traditional approach to Exceptional Case Marking structures. Marcel den Dikken writes on a strange phenomenon in English where the wh-pronoun what seems to trigger agreement and can have a human referent in a particular free relative construction. He proposes that this relative pronoun is accompanied by an unpronounced noun which licenses these properties on the pronoun.

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their work in improving the quality of these papers.

March–June 2023
Mark Newson & Péter Szigetvári