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Approaches to Hungarian: Volume 14: Papers from the 2013 Piliscsaba Conference
Edited by Katalin É. Kiss, Balázs Surányi and Éva Dékány
[Approaches to Hungarian 14] 2015
► pp. 37–64

Inverse agreement and Hungarian verb paradigms

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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.
Published online: 3 June 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/atoh.14.02bar
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Cited by (6)

Cited by six other publications

Coppock, Elizabeth
2022. Object agreement in Hungarian. Journal of Uralic Linguistics 1:1 ► pp. 121 ff. DOI logo
Dékány, Éva
2021. Pronouns. In The Hungarian Nominal Functional Sequence [Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 100], ► pp. 213 ff. DOI logo
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. DOI logo
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. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2017. On the Syntax of Missing Objects [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 244], DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2017. References. In On the Syntax of Missing Objects [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 244], ► pp. 178 ff. DOI logo

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