Common Contracts

The Objective Conjugation in Hungarian: Agreement Without Phi Features

February 4th, 2012

• Filed
  February 4th, 2012

Abstract Verbal agreement is normally in person, number and gender, but Hungar- ian verbs agree with their objects in definiteness instead: a Hungarian verb appears in the objective conjugation when it governs a definite object. The sensitivity of the objective conjugation suffixes to the definiteness of the object has been attributed to the supposition that they function as incorporated object pronouns (Szamosi 1974; den Dikken 2006), but we argue instead that they are agreement markers registering the object’s formal, not semantic, definiteness. Evidence comes from anaphoric bind- ing, null anaphora (pro-drop), extraction islands, and the insensitivity of the objec- tive conjugation to any of the factors known to condition the use of affixal and clitic pronominals. We propose that the objective conjugation is triggered by a formal def- initeness feature and offer a grammar that determines, for a given complement of a verb, whether it triggers the objective conjugation on the verb. Al