The evolution of functional left peripheries in the Hungarian sentence
Katalin É. Kiss · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2014
It is argued that the Proto-Hungarian sentence was SOV, where the subject also functioned as topic, and the object functioned as secondary topic or focus, depending on whether or not it elicited verbal agreement. The reanalysis of the head-final clause as a head-initial structure started with the spreading of rightward extraposition, which led to the reinterpretation of the postverbal section of the sentence as the base position of arguments, and the reanalysis of the preverbal section as a purely functional domain including an immediately preverbal predicative position, a focus slot, a Neg head, a landing site for quantifier raising, and a topic position.