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Share Paper 3171

Hungarian Object Agreement with Personal Pronouns
András Bárány
208-217 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

In Hungarian, definite noun phrases generally trigger object agreement, but not all personal pronouns do. While third person personal pronouns always require object agreement, first person pronouns surface with subject agreement only. In the context of a first person subject, second person pronouns trigger object agreement, but not in the context of a third person subject. I argue that analyses based on referential differences between first and second person pronouns and third person pronouns cannot capture the distribution of agreement as it cuts across semantic properties like definiteness and indexicality and I suggest a syntactic analysis based on Béjar and Rezac's (2009) cyclic Agree. The verb agrees with all personal pronoun objects, but agreement is only spelled out if the subject values features on the same probe as the object. This way, the features of both the subject and the object determine whether object agreement appears on the verb or not.

Published in

Proceedings of the 32nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Ulrike Steindl, Thomas Borer, Huilin Fang, Alfredo García Pardo, Peter Guekguezian, Brian Hsu, Charlie O'Hara, and Iris Chuoying Ouyang
Table of contents
Printed edition: $375.00