Object agreement in Hungarian
In defense of a semantic solution
This paper contributes another round in the debate over how to analyze object agreement in Hungarian, a form of
differential object marking that is found among other Uralic languages as well. I have previously argued that the choice of
conjugation is determined not by the syntactic category of the object, but rather on the basis of semantic factors, primarily: on
the Lexical Familiarity Hypothesis (LFH), selected lexical items are assigned a definiteness feature in virtue of a certain type
of familiarity presupposition that they carry. Subsequent work has raised challenges for the LFH. This paper considers what would
be necessary in order for these challenges to be met. I conclude that the LFH can be defended, if supplemented by a certain set of
independently-motivated assumptions. In fact, this theory enjoys certain advantages over the most recent alternative.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Definiteness
- 3.DP-hood
- 4.Lexical familiarity
- 4.1The lexical familiarity hypothesis
- 4.2Challenges for the lexical familiarity hypothesis
- 4.2.1Person agreement
- 4.2.2Possessives
- 5.Hybrid account
- 6.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
This article is currently available as a sample article.
References (61)
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