Abstract
The paper aims to give a diachronic overview of the changes that resulted in the currently wide distribution of the -i suffix found on prenominal PP modifiers, which has often been described as a derivational suffix but is rather a licensing head for modifiers of certain types. Data from Old Hungarian, Middle Hungarian and Early Modern Hungarian will outline the syntactic change in the use of való ‘orig. being’ and -i, along with the rise of a new participial copular form. The changes have led to -i becoming the general modifier head for prenominal PPs. The paper will further argue that the lack of -i with goal and directional PPs in present day Hungarian is due to syntactic reasons in some cases and to semantic ones in others.
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Notes
- 1.
The material presented here is based on research supported by the Hungarian Generative Diachronic Syntax 2 project (NKFIH 112057 grant).
- 2.
For the purposes of this paper, I will set aside the participial elements történő ‘happening’ or szóló ‘sounding’ that are also used with prenominal modifiers. Arguably, these are still verbal participles so while their distribution is of interest in the general structure of modification, they are not grammaticalized elements like való, making their syntactic properties more transparently verbal.
- 3.
The abbreviations used in the glosses are the following: abl—ablative, acc –accusative, all—allative, dat—dative, del—delative, ela—elative, ill—illative, ine—inessive, ins—instrumental, mod—modifier, pl—plural, poss—possessive, ptcp—participle, sub—sublative, sup—superessive.
- 4.
I am relying on corpus data from databases developed (and under development) at the Research Institute for Linguistics in Budapest: the Old Hungarian Corpus (Simon and Sass 2012), the Historical Corpus of Private texts for Middle Hungarian (Dömötör 2013), and the Hungarian Historical Corpus for Modern Hungarian. Only some of the texts are normalized for modern Hungarian spellings, so wherever it was not possible to simply search for the regular modern forms, I also searched for various spelling options in the digitized version with the original spelling. This makes it possible that I have not found all the relevant data or could not find some data due to its unpredictable spelling, which explains the lack of numerical evidence for the tendencies I am describing here and the fact that I treat them as tendencies and changes of relative frequency rather than categorical, abrupt changes in most cases. With the development of these databases, especially of the Old Hungarian one, one will be able to make more precise estimations with respect to the time of certain changes and the appearance or disappearance of certain constructions.
- 5.
According to Klemm (1928) and others, grammar writers even advocated for using –i with oblique suffixes in order to reduce the extensive use of való, which still had a wider distribution in the early 19th century. This resulted in lexicalized forms, like nagy-ban-i [big-ine-mod] ‘wholesale’, a word that is still used today.
- 6.
At the same time, post-head complements and adjuncts are claimed to have become slightly more frequent throughout the written period (Simonyi 1914; Honti and Varga 2012), although there is no exact numerical data to fully support that claim. This tendency is in accordance with the general change from a head-final language toward a more head-initial one, allowing for post-head complements and adjuncts in the NP as well.
- 7.
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer of this paper for providing the example in (29b) and for pointing out that keresztül ‘across, through’ may need an explanation different from the other goal PPs.
- 8.
I thank the editors of the volume for this comment and for raising the possible parallel with English across.
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Hegedűs, V. (2018). The Rise of the Modifier Suffix -i with PPs. In: Bartos, H., den Dikken, M., Bánréti, Z., Váradi, T. (eds) Boundaries Crossed, at the Interfaces of Morphosyntax, Phonology, Pragmatics and Semantics. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 94. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90710-9_7
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