The Even Yearbook 16 (2024)

This is the 16th 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 writing, reviewing, and rewriting process took longer than usual this time, but finally the volume is out.

As always, the volume contains working papers by staff and PhD students of the department. We have three syntax papers (Xing & den Dikken, Al-Wardat, and Newson), one on phonotactics (Shbeeb), one on morphophonology (Khalil), and one on historical phonology (Starčević). Three of the papers analyse Middle Eastern varieties of Arabic (Lebanese, Syrian, and Jordanian), the others discuss Mandarin, Hungarian, and Common Germanic.

Xing and den Dikken’s paper investigates the difference between two options in Mandarin conditional ‘if’ clauses which are either introduced by ru or by ru guo. The latter is more promiscuous in its tolerance of both focus and topic fronting while the latter allows focus fronting of subjects readily, focus fronting of non-subjects marginally and topic fronting not at all. The authors propose an biclausal analysis of ru guo conditionals, accounting for why it allows a greater variety of Ā-movements.

Al-Wardat investigates the marking of objects on Jordanian Arabic verbs. He argues that a variety of observations support the claim that these markers are clitics rather than agreement morphemes. He further demonstrates that clitic doubling in Jordanian Arabic, while sharing some properties of a similar phenomenon in River Plate Spanish, differs from this in that it allows doubling for internal arguments other than the indirect object.

Starčević discusses Verner’s Law, an Early Germanic regularity, from the point of view of the glottal dimensions of GW ‘glottal width’ and GT ‘glottal tension’ starting from Iverson & Salmons’s (2003) analysis. Contrary to their claim that enhancement with GW can only be found in languages with an opposition in the fricatives rooted in GT vs ∅, we show that it was also found in Old English and Early Germanic, two languages in which (initially at least) only a single (lenis) series of fricatives existed.

Khalil examines biconsonantal roots in Lebanese Arabic as a core part of the morphosyntactic paradigm in the language. Biconsonantal roots show a geminated C2 as well as a glide preceding the inflectional suffixes for the 1st and 2nd persons in form I, typical of final-weak roots, e.g. maddayte ‘you.fem extended’ (biconsonantal) and sallayte ‘you.fem entertained’ (final-weak). Final-weak roots are triconsonantal roots wherein the third and last consonant is either the palatal glide /y/ or the labiovelar /w/. The data shows that the glide in biconsonantal roots (maddayte above) is a byproduct of Arabic morphophonology as dictated by phonotactics, unlike final-weak glides (sallayte above), which are a part of the root.

Newson’s paper analyses case assignment in Hungarian causatives, based on Baker’s analysis of similar phenomena in Sakha. It is argued, however, that as Hungarian and Sakha differ in the statuses of their VPs as hard or soft case domains, Baker’s analysis does not straightforwardly translate to the Hungarian data. An alternative proposal is put forward, developing the notion of soft domains as being relevant only for DPs assigned dependent case. Unmarked cases are only actualised in hard domains. This accounts for why the base intransitive subject and the base object inside the causative are assigned a clause dependent case rather than an unmarked case inside the VP.

Shbeeb investigates the phonological process of vowel epenthesis in the Aleppine Dialect (AD) of Arabic, an urban variety spoken in northern Syria. The data show that AD systematically inserts /ɪ/ to break up final CVCC clusters in isolated words, even when these clusters conform to the Sonority Sequencing Principle, indicating a general ban on complex codas word-finally. Across word boundaries, however, epenthesis is not uniform: it is regularly blocked when a following vowel allows resyllabification of the final consonant, and it is often absent when the final cluster is homorganic or involves a sonorant–obstruent sequence, but retained with more marked obstruent–obstruent codas.

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

December 2025
Mark Newson & Péter Szigetvári