Construction sets and unmarked forms

Construction application can be made more efficient by organizing constructions into sets and by imposing an ordering on when a construction set should be considered. This technique gives us moreover a way to handle unmarked cases, which are abundant in all the world’s languages. This paper presents a non-trivial case study to introduce and illustrate the utility of construction sets, namely Hungarian verbal agreement, which is part of the Hungarian system for expressing argument structure. Hungarian verbal agreement is interesting because it has a dual conjugation system with mono-personal and poly-personal agreement, i.e. agreement with subject only or with subject and object. The choice which system is chosen depends on complex syntactic and semantic considerations. Moreover the morphemes chosen to express agreement and case marking depend on many factors, including the phonological properties of the stem. This chapter therefore illustrates not only how construction sets are useful but also how construction grammar can take multiple linguistic levels into account.