I propose a solution for the lack of agreement with first and second person pronouns in the Hungarian objective paradigm. Following Béjar & Rezac (2009) and É. Kiss (2013), I suggest that Cyclic Agree gives rise to an Inverse Agreement system in Hungarian, in which the verb shows intransitive agreement in cases where the object has equally or more highly specified features than the subject. The appearance of the second person agreement suffix only with first person but not third person subjects is given a principled syntactic explanation. All personal pronouns are argued to trigger agreement in person, with some instances, namely inverse ones, not spelled out due to the interaction of Cyclic Agree and the feature specifications of Hungarian personal pronouns.
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Béjar, Susana & Milan Rezac. 2009. Cyclic agree. Linguistic Inquiry 40(1). 35–73.
Bobaljik, Jonathan David & Phil Branigan. 2006. Eccentric agreement and multiple case-checking. In Alana Johns, Diane Massam & Juvenal Ndayiragije (eds.), Ergativity: Emerging issues, 47–77. Dordrecht: Springer.
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Coppock, Elizabeth. 2013. A semantic solution to the problem of Hungarian object agreement. Natural Language Semantics 21. 345–371.
Coppock, Elizabeth & Stephen Wechsler. 2010. Less-travelled paths from pronoun to agreement: the case of the Uralic object conjugations. In Miriam Butt & Tracy Holloway King (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG10 conference, 165–185. CSLI Publications.
Coppock, Elizabeth & Stephen Wechsler. 2012. The objective conjugation in Hungarian: agreement without phi-features. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 30. 699–740.
Dalrymple, Mary & Irina Nikolaeva. 2011. Objects and information structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dékány, Éva. 2011. A profile of the Hungarian DP: the interaction of lexicalization, agreement and linearization with the functional sequence: University of Tromsø dissertation. [URL].
Dikken, Marcel den. 2006. When Hungarians agree (to disagree). Ms., CUNY Graduate Center. New York.
É. Kiss, Katalin. 2003. A szibériai kapcsolat — avagy miért nem tárgyasan ragozzuk az igét 1. és 2. személyű tárgy esetén. Magyar Nyelvjárások 41. 321–326.
É. Kiss, Katalin. 2005. The inverse agreement constraint in Hungarian — a relic of a Uralic-Siberian sprachbund? In Hans Broekhuis, Norbert Corver, Riny Huybregts, Ursula Kleinheinz & Jan Koster (eds.), Organizing grammar — Linguistic studies in honor of Henk van Riemsdijk, 108–116. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
É. Kiss, Katalin. 2008. Free Word Order, (Non)configurationality, and Phases. Linguistic Inquiry 39(3). 441–475.
É. Kiss, Katalin. 2013. The inverse agreement constraint in Uralic languages. Finno-Ugric Languages and Linguistics 2(3). 2–21.
Harley, Heidi & Elizabeth Ritter. 2002. Person and number in pronouns: A feature-geometric analysis. Language 78(3). 482–526.
Kratzer, Angelika. 2009. Making a pronoun: Fake indexicals as windows into the properties of pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 40(2). 187–237.
Preminger, Omer. 2011. Agreement as a Fallible Operation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT dissertation.
Preminger, Omer. 2014. Agreement and its failures. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Rebrus, Péter. 2000. Morfofonológiai jelenségek. In Ferenc Kiefer (ed.), Strukturális magyar nyelvtan, vol. 3. Morfológia, 763–947. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.
Richards, Marc. 2008. Defective agree, case alternations, and the prominence of person (Linguistische Arbeitsberichte 86), 137–161. Universität Leipzig.
Rocquet, Amélie. 2013. Splitting objects: a nanosyntactic account of direct object marking. Ghent: Ghent University dissertation.
Rullman, Hotze. 2004. First and second person pronouns as bound variables. Linguistic Inquiry 35(1). 159–168.
Safir, Ken. 2014. One true anaphor. Linguistic Inquiry 45(1). 91–124.
Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Hierarchy of features and ergativity. In R.M.W. Dixon (ed.), Grammatical categories in Australian languages, 112–171. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.
Skorik, Piotr Ja. 1977. Грамматика чукотского языка, часть II: глагол, наречие, служебные слова [Grammar of Chukchi, vol II: verb, adverb and auxiliary words], Nauka.
2021. Pronouns. In The Hungarian Nominal Functional Sequence [Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 100], ► pp. 213 ff.
Kiss, Katalin É.
2021. What determines the varying relation of case and agreement? Evidence from the Ugric languages. Acta Linguistica Academica 67:4 ► pp. 397 ff.
Ruda, Marta
2018. Local Operations Deriving Long-Distance Relations: Object Agreement in Hungarian and the Genitive of Negation in Polish. In Boundaries Crossed, at the Interfaces of Morphosyntax, Phonology, Pragmatics and Semantics [Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 94], ► pp. 133 ff.
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