SUBJECT-PREDICATE AGREEMENT IN MIDDLE HUNGARIAN

This paper discusses person/number agreement between subject and predicate in the Middle Hungarian period. In view of the fact that in most of these constructions formal agreement is the only possibility, the author gives detailed consideration only to cases in which the speaker can choose between two - or in some cases, from three - different types of agreement (formal and semantic agreement, as well as redundant formal agreement). The possibility of choice among these types of agreement is peculiar to the period under investigation in some cases, but in others it is a quite general feature that is present in today's Hungarian, too; the regularities of person agreement are in general identical with those of earlier as well as later periods, whereas number agreement exhibits certain differences of proportion. With respect to the latter topic, two main groups of cases can be distinguished: first, cases in which the sentence has a single subject but its meaning or that of some other part of the sentence may elicit plural agreement (e.g., a collective noun, a noun of quantity, a quantified noun, or a noun with a possessive suffix in the role of subject, or else a subject accompanied by an adverbial of companion); and second, cases in which coordinated subjects open the possibility of choice between formal and semantic agreement. It is a special feature of Middle Hungarian that the predicate can be an adverbial participle; in these cases, the form of the participle exhibits number agreement or lack of agreement between the subject and the predicate.