A postposition with ambition: tracking the expansion of számára

This thesis investigates the ongoing expansion of the Hungarian postposition számára into syntactic environments traditionally reserved for the morphological dative case (-nak/-nek). The study is corpus-based and draws on data extracted from two complementary resources: the Hungarian Gigaword Corpus, a synchronic corpus of approximately 1.5 billion tokens spanning six registers, and the Hungarian Historical Corpus, a diachronic corpus of approximately 30 million tokens covering the period 1772–2010. The investigation is organized around six verbs — segít ‘help’, kedvez ‘be favourable to’, megjelenik ‘appear’, feltűnik ‘become noticeable’, fáj ‘hurt’, and hiányzik ‘be missing’ — selected as verbs that take a dative argument that is, or can be, an experiencer. Across all six verbs the postposition is found to occur as an alternative to the morphological dative, with varying frequency and distribution. The results show that számára is actively expanding beyond its original benefactive domain into evaluative, perceptual, and experiencer contexts, and that this expansion is not random but conditioned by identifiable semantic factors, including verb type and the status of the argument within the predicate's core structure, as well as by register-related factors, with a marked concentration in formal and institutional language. The diachronic data situate this process primarily in the twentieth century. Since the phenomenon is still underway, further research — including broader verb samples and other experimental methods — will be needed to determine whether the expansion of számára will remain confined to specific contexts or develop into a more general restructuring of Hungarian argument encoding.