Inverse agreement and Hungarian verb paradigms
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Authors
Abstract
I propose a solution for the lack of agreement with first and second person pronouns in the Hungarian objective paradigm. Following Béjar & Rezac (2009) and É. Kiss (2013), I suggest that Cyclic Agree gives rise to an Inverse Agreement system in Hungarian, in which the verb shows intransitive agreement in cases where the object has equally or more highly specified features than the subject. The appearance of the second person agreement suffix only with first person but not third subjects is given a principled syntactic explanation. All personal pronouns are argued to trigger agreement in person and number, with some instances, namely inverse ones, not spelled out due to the interaction of Cyclic Agree and the feature specifications of Hungarian personal pronouns.