Marking Aspect in Social Events: The Hungarian Verbal Prefix meg- Increases Mutuality

Abstract

Linguistic event construal — the cognitive process by which speakers mentally frame and structure situations in discourse — underpins how events are segmented, temporally organized, and interpreted [1]. While grammatical aspect is known to influence the saliency of different event components [2], its role in shaping the conceptualization of interpersonal relationships has received less attention. This study investigates whether the Hungarian verbal prefix meg-, a marker of telicity in verbs and perfect aspect in sentences [3], affects the mutuality construal of social verbs: shifting interpretation from an individual action to a partner-directed interaction.

We hypothesize that by lending telic completeness to the verb and highlighting the end state of the event, meg- increases the salience of the patient or partner needed for event completion, thereby encouraging mutual interpretation. For example, the base verb csókolni (“to kiss,” atelic infinitive) can refer to an ongoing or habitual action without a defined end state, while the prefixed megcsókolni (telic infinitive) marks the event as complete and requires a clearly individuated patient. This reinforces the interpretation of the event as involving not only the agent (the kisser) but also the patient (the kissee).

In a preregistered web-based forced-choice experiment, 51 native Hungarian speakers judged whether 95 infinitives and their meg-prefixed counterparts referred to self-directed or mutual actions. After compiling ratings, stimuli were divided into four quartiles based on the base verbs’ mean mutuality score — Q1 (low mutuality), Q2 (moderately low), Q3 (moderately high), and Q4 (high) — to test whether the effect varied with the inherent lexical semantics of base verbs. Specifically, we expected a ceiling effect for verbs in Q4.

Mutuality judgments were analyzed using a generalized linear mixed-effects model with fixed effects for verb type (base or prefixed), mutuality quartile, and their interaction. It included random intercepts for participants and verb pairs, and a by-participant random slope for verb type. Meg-prefixed verbs were overall significantly more likely to be judged as mutual than their unprefixed counterparts (β=0.8032, SE=0.1088, p<0.0001), confirming our hypothesis. Only base verbs in Q4 did not show a significant increase, likely due to the expected ceiling effect.

This experiment furthers prior work on aspect and linguistic event structure by demonstrating that grammatical aspect shapes not only temporal framing but can also affect interpersonal event construal. More broadly, it contributes to our understanding of how morphosyntactic features dynamically shape conceptual event representations during language comprehension.

References

[1] A. Cienki and O. K. Iriskhanova, “Aspect through the lens of event construal,” in Aspectuality across Languages: Event Construal in Speech and Gesture, A. Cienki and O. K. Iriskhanova, Eds. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2018, pp. 7–59.

[2] T. R. Ferretti, M. Kutas, and K. McRae, “Verb aspect and the activation of event knowledge,” J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn., vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 182–196, 2007.

[3] K. Szili, “A meg- igekötő funkcióiról másképpen I.: A meg- mint lexikaiaspektus-képző,” Magyar Nyelvőr, vol. 142, no. 2, pp. 170–186, 2018.