In the present paper we take a close look at the syntactic and semantic restrictions imposed on atelic unaccusative verbs occurring with a cognate object-like nominal in Hungarian. The starting point for our discussion is the proposal in Farkas (2019), according to which in Hungarian there are no objects which are literally cognate with the intransitive verb they accompany; instead, there are three classes of so-called pseudoobjects which fulfil the function of the aspectual cognate object in

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... is language. We show that atelic unaccusative verbs in Hungarian are compatible, first and foremost, with members of one particular class of pseudo-objects, namely the ones that express or highlight the degree of the change of the event expressed by the verb such as (egy) nagyot '(one) big.ACC', (egy) hatalmasat '(one) huge.ACC' and (egy) óriásit '(one) gigantic.ACC'. We also demonstrate that, as opposed to the claims made in the literature, these verbs are not completely unacceptable with the light pseudo-object egyet 'one.ACC'.