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Article published In:
Diachronica
Vol. 37:1 (2020) ► pp.1–42

Grammaticalization without Feature Economy

Evidence from the Voice Cycle in Hungarian

ORCID logo | Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

The present paper is a corpus-based study of the Voice Cycle in Hungarian. Based on data from the Old Hungarian Corpus and the Hungarian Historical Corpus, I will argue that while in Old Hungarian, middle voice was encoded through a separate inflectional paradigm (contextual allomorphy in the subject agreement suffix conditional on the feature content of a silent Voice head), in Modern Hungarian, middle voice is encoded through dedicated middle voice suffixes (i.e., the Voice head is spelled out overtly). I will claim that the underlying grammaticalization process involved the reanalysis of frequentative suffixes (v heads) as middle voice suffixes (Voice heads). I will show that this reinterpretation was not based on shared abstract features, but rather, on a principled correlation between middle voice and frequentative aspect: since some types of middles (antipassives and dispositional middles) were more likely to be associated with a frequentative or habitual reading than actives, frequentative suffixes were susceptible to reanalysis as middle suffixes in the course of language acquisition. I will thus claim that in addition to Feature Economy (van Gelderen 2011), reinterpretation based on correlation between featurally independent grammatical markers should also be regarded as a mechanism of grammaticalization.

Keywords: grammaticalization, cycles, voice, middles, syntax, morphology, Hungarian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Middle voice: A note on terminology
  • 3.Late Old Hungarian: AgrS allomorphy conditional on voice
  • 4.Excursion: A finer-grained syntax and semantics
  • 5.The collapse of the middle paradigm
  • 6.The emergence of middle voice suffixes
  • 7.Reinterpretation based on correlation between middle voice and frequentative aspect
  • 8.The breakdown of voice syncretism and the rise of suffix stacking
  • 9.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

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

Published online: 7 April 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.19008.hal
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