Abstract
Hungarian nouns take some seventeen or so suffixal case inflections, e.g. ház ‘house (nominative)’ ∼ ház-ban ‘in a house (inessive)’. Personal pronouns have corresponding case-marked forms but these are not formed by means of suffixal case inflections. Instead, postposition-like stems expressing the individual cases are inflected for each pronoun’s person and number in exactly the same way that nouns inflect for possessor agreement or true postpositions inflect for a pronominal complement (inessive benn-e ‘in him’, benn-ük ‘in them; cf. könyv-e ‘his book’, könyv-ük ‘their book’ from the noun könyv; mögött-e ‘behind him’, mögött-ük ‘behind them’ from the postposition mögött). This manner of case marking embodies a highly unusual pattern of ‘functor-argument reversal’, which is problematic for many models of morphosyntax. In our account of this phenomenon, we adopt the modification of Stump’s (2001) Paradigm Function Morphology proposed by Stump (2002); this modification (‘PFM2’) distinguishes form paradigms (expressing morphological properties) from content paradigms (expressing syntactic properties). We also distinguish absolute forms from (bound) conjunct forms of the case postpositions. Pronominal case forms are built on the case postpositions’ absolute forms and a rule of paradigm linkage that effects functor-argument reversal guarantees that their person-number inflection realizes the content of each pronoun.
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Notes
KVF (86–88, Chap. 1.2.4.1) refer to ‘real postpositions’, which take an oblique case-marked complement. These correspond to our ‘pseudo-postpositions’. What we refer to as ‘true postpositions’ are called ‘case-like’ postpositions in KVF (86). Those elements are said not to assign any case to their complements but rather to take the bare, uninflected form of the noun (KVF:86–87), which is always identical to the traditional nominative case form. That characterization is actually closer to the analysis we will ultimately adopt, since it is more natural on our analysis, too, to think of ‘nominative’ as the bare form. The terminology and description we (and Creissels) adopt stresses the fact that those elements that take oblique marked complements are in most respects like nouns (or adverbial forms of verbs) and therefore should not be assigned to a class of adpositions. The terminology and description found in KVF, Chap. 1.2.4 stresses the fact that (our) true postpositions share a great many characteristics with case endings. However, we interpret this to mean that the case endings are more like postpositions than suffixes. In any event the confusing terminology strikingly reflects the problems these constructions pose for grammatical classification.
For instance, Huba Bartos points out to us that for some speakers, the pseudo-postposition kívül, uniquely, takes pronominal complement inflections. Also, nélkül ‘without’, in construction with a pronominal complement only, can behave like a true postposition and take person-number inflections (nélkül-ed ‘without you.sg’) or it can behave like a pseudo-postposition and take the adessive case (nál-ad nélkül lit. ‘adessive-2 sg without’, ‘without you’). (Cf. KVF:91.)
This description essentially follows Spencer (2008).
We say “constructional idiom” because such phrases lack much of the syntax of appositives. For instance, when a head noun is quantified it appears in the singular, but the demonstrative then shows formal, singular, agreement, rather than appearing in the plural as one might expect of a truly appositive expression: ez a három lány this.sg the three girl.sg ‘these three girls’. The plural form ezek would not be possible here. In addition, the demonstrative phrases lack the semantic property of non-restrictiveness normally associated with appositives.
For arguments that the superessive is just the consonant -n and not a vowel-initial suffix -Vn, see Abondolo (1988:253f).
Trommer argues that all affixes are underlyingly monosyllabic or asyllabic, though this claim rests on somewhat abstract analyses and segmentations of the conjugational system.
Traditional grammars usually segment such forms differently. For instance, they would generally conflate the -i formative and the first-person singular possessor suffix -m to give a compound suffix -im for plural nouns with first-person singular possessors. We regard this as a flawed approach but nothing in the analysis we present here actually hinges on this stance, so we will not justify our segmentations (in whose plausibility we are nevertheless rightly confident).
For present purposes, we will speak of a lexeme as having a single thematized stem. For certain lexemes, however, the identity of the theme vowel varies with the morphosyntactic property set being realized; for instance, szülő ‘parent’ has theme vowel ő by default but e with a third-person possessive suffix (szül-ő-m ‘my parent’ but szül-e-je ‘her parent’). There are various ways of formulating this kind of alternation that are compatible with the general analysis developed here.
Also known by other names, such as the ‘Elsewhere Condition’.
The distinction between content cells and form cells is closely related to (though not identical to) the distinction drawn by Sadler and Spencer (2001) between syntactic features and morphological features (on the basis of the Latin perfect passive periphrasis and its relationship to the deponency phenomenon discussed below).
There are, however, defective postpositions whose {infl:no} cell has no form correspondent; examples are révén ‘through, by means of’ and the benefactive postpositions számára and részére (KVF:336).
A reviewer asks why it’s necessary to assume that case postpositions lack content paradigms. This is not, strictly, an assumption but rather a consequence of our architecture, with its division between lexemes and inflected forms of lexemes, together with the decision to treat case as an inflectional property of nominals. In a syntax-driven model such as Minimalism, in which inflectional properties are syntactically represented functional heads, there is no notion of ‘lexeme/word form’ and no possible distinction between content and form paradigms. But then the case-marked pronouns raise serious problems, as detailed in Sect. 6 below.
The iota in (19) is the definite descriptor operator: ιxφ denotes the unique x such that φ. In addition, the identity of the first-person singular entity I′ and that of the possessor relation R are determined indexically.
This is not to say that the content paradigm determines all aspects of a lexeme’s behavior. As two reviewers remind us, an interesting case in point in Hungarian is the phenomenon of ‘anti-agreement’ (den Dikken 1999, 2006). When the possessor is 3PL and non-pronominal the possessum is inflected for 3SG: a nő-k könve-i ‘the women’s books’ but not *a nők könve-i-k. However, when the possessor is a 3rd person pronoun we see the opposite agreement pattern. The possessum obligatorily shows the number of the possessor but the pronominal possessor can only appear in the singular form even when it has plural reference: az ő könve-i ‘her/his books’, az ő könve-i-k ‘their books’ but not *az ők könve-i-k. We do not have an analysis of this intriguing phenomenon, though it strongly suggests that agreement syntax can choose which aspects of feature content in a content paradigm it should realize. Agreement mismatches of this sort are not rare, of course (Corbett 2006) and we agree with our reviewers that the anti-agreement phenomenon is a particularly interesting example. It would be well worthwhile investigating in proper detail what its implications are for our analysis, though this would require a separate study.
In the case at hand, f(σ) is abst(σ) and g(L) is the set of person/number properties expressed by the pronominal lexeme L.
The thesis of Dékány (2011) came to our attention too late to be included in our analysis. It reworks the system of Asbury (2008) by adding two extra layers of structure between the DP and the AxPrtP, headed by a K and an obligatorily covert N place head. This N place head serves as the possessum of the noun (‘the house its-place’). Case markers and postpositions take possessor agreements with pronominal complements because they agree with this N place head. (This analysis is designed to account for the semantics of local cases in their default spatial meanings; Dékány does not explain how the non-spatial causal-final -ért or the instrumental (comitative) -vAl are to be handled.) Although this new analysis seems to address some of our concerns with the approach of Asbury, at first sight it would appear to raise additional problems. However, it is difficult for us to assess the full implications of Dékány’s proposals for our treatment of the case-marked pronouns. This is because her focus is not on the case-marked pronouns, and also because her descriptive metalanguage is in some ways non-standard. For instance, the agreement morphology is not itself a syntactic terminal but “merely the morphological reflex of the operation Agree in the PP” (p. 143), but yet we also read that “agreement cliticizes onto the morphological word that spells out (or contains) K” (p. 130). However, it’s not clear what is meant by ‘cliticize’ here: suffixes also ‘cliticize’ (p. 186) and the case marker itself (e.g. benn- ‘in’) is a clitic which doesn’t require an overt host but can cliticize onto a covert pronoun (p. 157), which we take to be a contradiction in terms. In addition, it is not clear to us whether the innovation of an N place node plays any role other than serve as a kind of exception diacritic. (We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for directing us to Dékány’s work.)
A similar (though less spectacular) instance of functor-argument reversal arises in modern varieties of Breton, where object pronouns (traditionally expressed as verb clitics) are now expressed as forms of the preposition a ‘of’, which, like many prepositions in Breton, inflects for person/number and (in the third singular) for gender.
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Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper, but with slightly different versions of the PFM model, have been presented at the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (2008), at the University of Essex and the conference on the Morphology of the World’s Languages held at the University of Leipzig (2009), and at the University of Paris 7 (2013). We are grateful to these audiences for comments and to a number of colleagues who have given us advice on earlier versions of the paper, particularly Huba Bartos, Olivier Bonami, Berthold Crysmann, Bernard Fradin, Caspar de Groot, István Kenesei, Ferenc Kiefer, Edith Moravcsik, Juliette Thuilier, and Jochen Trommer as well as two anonymous referees who provided very detailed suggestions and criticisms.
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Spencer, A.J., Stump, G.T. Hungarian pronominal case and the dichotomy of content and form in inflectional morphology. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 31, 1207–1248 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-013-9207-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-013-9207-7