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Diachronica
Vol. 41:1 (2024) ► pp.99–126

Reconstructing the decoupling of case and agreement in Old Hungarian

Evidence from epithets and names as syntactic fossils

ORCID logo | Pázmány Péter Catholic University | Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics

The interdependence of accusative case and object agreement has changed dramatically during the history of Ugric languages. While Proto-Ugric exhibited full interdependence (mediated by topicality), this connection has loosened in the extant Ob-Ugric languages (Mansi and Khanty), and it is severed completely in Late to Modern Hungarian. In this paper, I introduce new, hitherto unreported empirical evidence from nicknames and family names that preserve archaic syntactic features for an intermediate stage of Early Old Hungarian (which predates our earliest written records) where case assignment was still a function of topicality but object agreement was already a function of definiteness. In addition to providing insight into an unrecorded stage of Hungarian, my findings also contribute to a more thorough understanding of the connection between case, agreement and information structure in Ugric and beyond.

Keywords: case, agreement, information structure, syntactic reconstruction, Ugric, Uralic, Old Hungarian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Case and agreement in Ugric, and the challenge of Hungarian
  • 3.New evidence: Archaic syntax preserved in personal names
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1A dependent case analysis of Early Old Hungarian
    • 4.2Against an incorporation analysis
    • 4.3The underrepresentation of the -ja allomorph
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 25 April 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.23020.hal
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