ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses converbs. According to the protocol sketched in the Introduction to the whole volume, section 3.1 deals with the head; it provides a survey of the most distinctive syntactic, semantic and morphological characteristics of the different types of converb, with special emphasis on their formation from their verbal basis (which is not regarded as a type of derivation in current generative grammars, see Kenesei (2000: 116–128); nevertheless, we use the marking ‘ConvP’, but only as a shorthand, with no theoretical commitment to the traditional derivational approach, see Keszler (2000a: 317)). This will help readers to identify converbs and converbial phrases in Hungarian on the basis of their form, function and position in the sentence. Section 3.2 focuses on the internal syntax, while 3.3 on the external syntax of converbial constructions, that is, the syntactic uses and sentence-internal distribution of converbs.
