Key research themes
1. How do translanguaging practices facilitate heritage language maintenance in Hungarian-English early childhood classrooms?
This research area explores the pedagogical use of translanguaging — the strategic alternation and integration of multiple languages within a learning environment — focusing on bilingual Hungarian-English early childhood classrooms. It examines how translanguaging supports heritage language preservation among immigrant and descendant children in predominantly English-speaking contexts, addressing sociolinguistic identity, intercultural communication, and language acquisition through meaningful play and bilingual teaching methods.
2. What strategic frameworks govern the official linguistic rights and minority language preservation of Hungarian communities in Serbia?
This theme investigates the design, implementation, and critical evaluation of institutional strategies developed by the Hungarian National Minority Council (HNMC) of Serbia for safeguarding linguistic rights within a multilingual socio-political landscape. It emphasizes legal frameworks, resource allocation, community mobilization, and political advocacy aimed at enhancing the official use of Hungarian language and script, raising minority language awareness, and integrating linguistic policies within wider cultural and educational programs.
3. How do functional and pragmatic approaches elucidate Hungarian sentence structure, word order, and intonation patterns?
Research under this theme focuses on Hungarian's non-configurational syntax, with particular attention to functional discourse grammar frameworks that integrate pragmatics, semantics, and phonology. It examines how sentence word order — especially the post-verbal field — conveys discourse functions like Topic, Focus, and pragmatic Catalyst, while intonation patterns, including nuclear stress placement and pitch contours, interact with syntactic and information-structural elements. This perspective facilitates nuanced descriptions and pedagogical approaches beyond traditional morphosyntactic analyses.
4. What evidence supports an Indo-European influence or substrate in Hungarian, particularly concerning early numerals and lexical items?
This theme examines linguistic evidence hinting at early contacts or substrates involving Indo-European, Germanic, and Turkic languages in Hungarian. It critically assesses etymologies of core vocabulary (e.g., 'nyak' meaning 'neck'), numerals, and phonological phenomena possibly reflecting ancient borrowings or shared linguistic ancestry. By contrasting Uralic reconstructions with alternative explanations involving Germanic and Altaic origins, this research challenges conventional genealogical classifications, advocating a multi-layered historical linguistic model for Hungarian that incorporates complex strata of influence and linguistic convergence.
5. How are additive, declarative, rhetorical, and adversative questions syntactically and prosodically distinguished in Hungarian and related languages?
This research area focuses on the interface between syntax, prosody, and semantics in non-canonical question forms in Hungarian and other languages, such as Greek and Russian. It identifies morphosyntactic and prosodic mismatches in left-peripheral additive phrases and differentiated focus structures, analyzing their effects on stress assignment, verb fronting, and cliticization. The work proposes that these distinctions reflect encoded semantic types, preserving meaning differences across declarative, rhetorical, and adversative question subtypes, and offers typological insights for morphosyntactic theory and the pragmatics of question formation.