A semantic solution to the problem of Hungarian object agreement

• Published in: Natural language semantics Vol. 21; no. 4; pp. 345 - 371
• Main Author: Coppock, Elizabeth
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer 01.12.2013; Springer Netherlands; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Agreement (Grammatical); Compositional DRT; Conjugation; Definiteness; Demonstratives; Descriptive studies and applied theories; Discourse; Discourse representation theory; Familiarity; General Language Studies and Linguistics; Grammatical conjugation; Hungarian; Hungarian language; Jämförande språkvetenskap och lingvistik; Linguistics; Noun phrases; Nouns; Numerals; Object agreement; Philosophy of Language; Presupposition; Presuppositions; Pronouns; Quantifiers; Reference (Semantic); Referents; Semantics; Semantics and pragmatics; Social Sciences; Specific Languages; Språkstudier; Syntax; Compositional DRT; Hungarian; Presupposition; Definiteness; Object agreement; Semantics; Syntactic category; Conjugation; Grammatical agreement
• ISSN: 0925-854X; 1572-865X
• DOI: 10.1007/s11050-013-9096-7

This paper offers a semantically-based solution to the problem of predicting whether a verb will display the subjective conjugation or the objective conjugation in Hungarian. This alternation correlates with the definiteness of the object, but definiteness is not a completely reliable indicator of the subjective/objective alternation, nor is specificity. A prominent view is that the subjective/objective alternation is conditioned by the syntactic category of the object, but this view has also been shown to be untenable. This paper offers a semantic solution: If the referential argument of a phrase is lexically specified as familiar/new, then the phrase bears the feature [+DEF]/[-DEF], and this feature governs the conjugations. The notions of novelty and familiarity are made precise using a compositional version of DRT in the context of a suitably large fragment of Hungarian, including local and non-local personal pronouns, demonstratives, definite and indefinite articles, quantifiers, wh-words, numerals, and possessives.