Agreement in Hungarian
 
When Hungarians Agree (to Disagree) -- The Fine Art of Phi and Art
 
Marcel den Dikken
http://web.gc.cuny.edu/dept/lingu/dendikken/
 
 
The aim of this series of lectures is (i) to review the realm of agreement phenomena in Hungarian, and (ii) to present a maximally integrated account of them from the point of view of the minimalist theories of Agree and locality.
 
Hungarian agreement phenomena are conveniently classifiable as 'phi-based' or 'article-based' - where by 'phi-based' I mean that reference is made to the phi-features of the agreeing elements, and by 'article-based' I refer to agreement between the finite verb and the (possibly phonologically null) definite article (D-head; cf. Bartos 1997) of an accusative-marked noun phrase in its complement. Taking this dichotomy as a starting point, the Hungarian agreement phenomena that the lectures will concern themselves with include the following:
 
'Phi':
* agreement and anti-agreement in possessed noun phrases
* agreement, anti-agreement and lack of agreement in adpositional phrases
* agreement, anti-agreement and lack of agreement on causativised infinitives
* apparent person agreement on finite verbs (2nd person "-lak/lek") as cliticisation
 
'Art':
* 'objective' agreement as definite article ('Art') agreement or cliticisation
* 'objective' agreement and the behaviour of pronominal objects
* 'objective' agreement and restructuring/clause-union constructions
* 'objective' agreement (and Case switch) in 'raising-to-object' contexts
 
For 'phi-based' agreement and anti-agreement in possessed noun phrases, Den Dikken (1999a) presents an analysis assimilating it to agreement and anti-agreement in Celtic (Welsh, in particular). That analysis will be updated from the point of view of current minimalism, being rethought from an Agree-based perspective. 'Phi-based' agreement in Hungarian, outside the domain of subject agreement, is by and large a matter of number; but the special "-lak/lek" form of finite verbs seems to instantiate person agreement with the object. Den Dikken (1999b/2004) analyses it in terms of object cliticisation, breaking "-lak/lek" up into an object clitic "-l" and a subject-agreement marker "-k" -- the subject-agreement marker from the 'subjective/indefinite' agreement paradigm. Second person objects thus behave on a par with first person objects, which likewise trigger'subjective/indefinite' agreement. Keeping the central insight of this earlier work, I will streamline the clitic-based account, and extend it to definiteness agreement more generally. Restrictions on clitic combinations will end up bearing the brunt of accounting for the distribution of the definite and indefinite agreement paradigms. A major ingredient of the discussion of definiteness agreement in Hungarian will be an analysis of 'long-distance' agreement - in particular, cases involving wh/focus-movement out of an embedded finite clause, whose account will be modelled closely on the analysis of 'raising-to-object' phenomena found in Algonquian (Bruening 2001, Branigan/MacKenzie 2002), Tsez (Polinsky/Potsdam 2001), and Itelmen (Bobaljik/Wurmbrand, to appear).
Time permitting, the discussion will also address inflected infinitives (Tóth 2000), and agreement in adpositional phrases (Marácz 1989, É. Kiss 2002:Ch. 8).
 
A kurzus anyagát tartalmazó cikk >>
 
Selected references:
Bartos, Huba. 1997. On 'subjective' and 'objective' agreement in Hungarian. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 44. 363-84.
Bobaljik, Jonathan & Susi Wurmbrand. to appear. The domain of agreement. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.
Branigan, Phil & Marguerite MacKenzie. 2002. Altruism, AN-movement, and object agreement in Innuaiműn. Linguistic Inquiry 33. 385-407.
Bruening, Benjamin. 2001. Syntax at the edge: Cross-clausal phenomena and the syntax of Passamaquoddy. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
Dikken, Marcel den. 1999a. On the structural representation of possession and agreement. The case of (anti-)agreement in Hungarian possessed nominal phrases. In István Kenesei (ed.), Crossing boundaries: Theoretical advances in Central and Eastern European languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 137-78.
Dikken, Marcel den. 1999b/2004. Agreement and 'clause union' . In Katalin É. Kiss & Henk van Riemsdijk (eds), Verb clusters: A study of Hungarian, German and Dutch. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 445-98. [written in 1999; published in its original form in 2004]
É. Kiss, Katalin. 2002. The syntax of Hungarian. Cambridge: CUP.
Marácz, László. 1989. Asymmetries in Hungarian. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Groningen.
Polinsky, Maria & Eric Potsdam. 2001. Long-distance agreement and topic in Tsez. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 19. 583-646.
Rezac, Milan & Mélanie Jouitteau. to appear. Deriving the complementarity effect: Relativized Minimality in Breton agreement. Lingua.
Tóth, Ildikó. 2000. Inflected infinitives in Hungarian. Ph.D. dissertation, Tilburg University.