An Integrated Perspective on Hungarian Nominal and Verbal Inflection

Abstract

There are systematic parallels between the nominal and verbal domains of Hungarian in their inflectional paradigms. Seeking a descriptively and explanatorily adequate syntactic analysis of these morphological parallels, this paper presents an integrated approach to Hungarian possessive and definiteness marking, with clitics as the key players. The marker -JA (the ‘possessive morpheme’ in the noun phrase and the ‘definiteness agreement marker’ in present tense clauses) is traced back to an object clitic in Proto-Uralic, and analysed in the same terms in present-day Hungarian. The distribution of -JA across the nominal and present-tense verbal paradigms is derived from specific structural representations of person and the alienable/inalienable possession distinction; the absence of -JA from the past tense verbal paradigm is made to fall out from an analysis of Hungarian past tense forms as inalienably possessed inflected participles.