  Hungarian is often referred to as a discourse-configurational language, since
the structural position of constituents is determined by their logical function
(topic or comment) rather than their grammatical function (e.g., subject or
object). We build on work by Koml\'osy (1989) and argue that in addition to
discourse context, the lexical semantics of the verb also plays a significant
role in determining Hungarian word order. In order to investigate the role of
lexical semantics in determining Hungarian word order, we conduct a
large-scale, data-driven analysis on the ordering of 380 transitive verbs and
their objects, as observed in hundreds of thousands of examples extracted from
the Hungarian Gigaword Corpus. We test the effect of lexical semantics on the
ordering of verbs and their objects by grouping verbs into 11 semantic classes.
In addition to the semantic class of the verb, we also include two control
features related to information structure, object definiteness and object NP
weight, chosen to allow a comparison of their effect size to that of verb
semantics. Our results suggest that all three features have a significant
effect on verb-object ordering in Hungarian and among these features, the
semantic class of the verb has the largest effect. Specifically, we find that
stative verbs, such as fed "cover", jelent "mean" and \"ovez "surround", tend
to be OV-preferring (with the exception of psych verbs which are strongly
VO-preferring) and non-stative verbs, such as b\'ir\'al "judge", cs\"okkent
"reduce" and cs\'okol "kiss", verbs tend to be VO-preferring. These findings
support our hypothesis that lexical semantic factors influence word order in
Hungarian.

Computation and Language