ABSTRACT
Hungarian is a member of the Ugric branch of the Ugro-Finnic language family. In the pre-Christian era the ancestors of the modern Hungarians inhabited an area between the Volga and Dnieper rivers in Central Asia. Subsequent migrations brought them into close contact with Turkic peoples in the area north of the Black Sea. Around 800 A.D., the Hungarians, who call themselves Magyars, entered the Carpathian Basin, occupying most of the area of modern Hungary. They have remained in the Carpathian Basin up to the present date, maintaining close contact with speakers of Slavic, Germanic, Romance, and Turkic languages. Despite these close contacts and despite massive lexical borrowing, Hungarian maintains many of its original Ugro-Finnic characteristics. These include vowel harmony, pragmatically flexible word order, an elaborate set of "agglutinative" case suffixes, an extensive system of aspect markers, verb-object agreement, placement of the noun in the singular when there is a quantifier that is in the plural, a basic SOV word order, and a tendency toward incorporation of the object into the verb. As we see below, each of these characteristically UgroFinnic features of Hungarian provides interesting data that can be brought to bear upon hypotheses regarding language acquisition strategies. We also see that many of these data are directly relevant to the universal operating principles that have been suggested by Slobin (1973), MacWhinney (1978), and others.
