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Nat Lang Linguist Theory (2012) 30:699740 DOI 10.1007/s11049-012-9165-5
The objective conjugation in Hungarian: agreement without phi-features
Elizabeth Coppock Stephen Wechsler
Received: 3 April 2010 / Accepted: 7 February 2012 / Published online: 8 March 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
Abstract Verbal agreement is normally in person, number and gender, but Hungarian verbs agree with their objects in deniteness instead: a Hungarian verb appears in the objective conjugation when it governs a denite object. The sensitivity of the objective conjugation sufxes to the deniteness of the object has been attributed to the supposition that they function as incorporated object pronouns (Szamosi 1974; den Dikken 2006), but we argue instead that they are agreement markers registering the objects formal, not semantic, deniteness. Evidence comes from anaphoric binding, null anaphora (pro-drop), extraction islands, and the insensitivity of the objective conjugation to any of the factors known to condition the use of afxal and clitic pronominals. We propose that the objective conjugation is triggered by a formal definiteness feature and offer a grammar that determines, for a given complement of a verb, whether it triggers the objective conjugation on the verb. Although the objective conjugation sufxes are not pronominal, they are thought to derive historically from incorporated pronouns (Hajd 1972), and we suggest that while referentiality and -features were largely lost, an association with topicality led to a formal condition of object deniteness. The result is an agreement marker that lacks -features.
Keywords Object agreement Pronoun incorporation Clitics Deniteness
E. Coppock ( )
Department of General Linguistics, Heinrich Heine University, Universittsstrasse 1, 40225 Dsseldorf, Germanye-mail: mailto:coppock@phil-fak.hhu.de
Web End =coppock@phil-fak.hhu.de
S. WechslerDepartment of Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station B5100, Austin, TX 78712-0198, USAe-mail: wechsler@mail.utexas.edu
700 E. Coppock, S. Wechsler
1 Introduction
Verbal agreement afxes evolve historically from the morphological incorporation of pronominal arguments into their verbal heads (Bopp 1842; Givn 1976; Bresnan and Mchombo 1987). Although agreement markers retain some qualities of the incorporated pronouns from which they derive, the two are fundamentally quite different. An incorporated pronoun is referential and functions as an argument, while an agreement afx has lost its referential status, and serves instead to register grammatical features of an argument phrase. This distinction therefore has wide-ranging grammatical consequences, interacting with issues...