The Evolution of Functional Left Peripheries in Hungarian Syntax
Oxford University Press eBooks · 2014
Abstract Hungarian, a Ugric language of the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family, is one of a handful of non-Indo-European languages with a documented history spanning more than 800 years. This book focuses on the restructuring of Hungarian syntax from head-final to head-initial, which started in the Proto-Hungarian age, and has led to fundamental structural changes resulting in the evolution of functional left peripheries on various levels of syntactic structure by the 16th century. It is shown how the SOV Proto-Hungarian sentence, displaying a fusion of thematic and functional roles, developed a clause structure with a V-initial VP and preverbal operator positions. Noun phrase determination by possessive suffixes was supplanted by prenominal articles, floating quantifiers developed into determiners, and the postpositional phrase evolved a head-initial pP-layer for particles, which soon found their way into the left periphery of the sentence. Non-finite complementation, and sporadic clause-final complementizers, gave way to a rich system of clause-initial complementizers. The mechanisms of change are those observed in Indo-European languages (reanalysis, grammaticalization, cyclicity), but the paths of change have often been different.