Reconstructing the decoupling of case and agreement in Old Hungarian: Evidence from epithets and names as syntactic fossils

The interdependence of accusative case and object agreement has changed dramatically during the history of Ugric languages. While Proto-Ugric exhibited full interdependence (mediated by topicality), this connection has loosened in the extant Ob-Ugric languages (Mansi and Khanty), and it is severed c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Diachronica 2024-06, Vol.41 (1), p.99-126
Main Author: Halm, Tamás
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Diachronic linguistics
Epithets
Grammatical agreement
Grammatical case
Hungarian language
Information structure
Language reconstruction
Linguistics
Nicknames
Syntactic features
Ugric languages
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Summary:The interdependence of accusative case and object agreement has changed dramatically during the history of Ugric languages. While Proto-Ugric exhibited full interdependence (mediated by topicality), this connection has loosened in the extant Ob-Ugric languages (Mansi and Khanty), and it is severed completely in Late to Modern Hungarian. In this paper, I introduce new, hitherto unreported empirical evidence from nicknames and family names that preserve archaic syntactic features for an intermediate stage of Early Old Hungarian (which predates our earliest written records) where case assignment was still a function of topicality but object agreement was already a function of definiteness. In addition to providing insight into an unrecorded stage of Hungarian, my findings also contribute to a more thorough understanding of the connection between case, agreement and information structure in Ugric and beyond.
ISSN:0176-4225
1569-9714
DOI:10.1075/dia.23020.hal