An MSSC-approach to Hungarian classifiers

This paper provides a formal semantic analysis of classifiers in Hungarian. We focus on the puzzle posed by classifier optionality in Hungarian, where most nouns can co-occur with a classifier, but do not have to. Here we show that the presence or absence of classifiers in a numeral expression has semantic consequences. Evidence in support of our analysis comes from nouns that are polysemous and have a physical object and an informational object sense, such as könyv 'book', festmény 'painting', magazin 'magazine'. We argue that Hungarian classifiers, such as darab, can take count nouns as their complement, and their role is restricting the domain of counting to physically distinct, Maximally Strongly Self-Connected entities (Grimm 2012) in the denotation of the noun they modify.