Null pronominal objects in Hungarian: A case of exaptation

Abstract

The paper argues against the wide-spread view that assumes a direct correlation between object–verb agreement and object pro-drop in Hungarian. Whereas object–verb agreement has been present in Hungarian since the first written sources, and can be traced back to Proto-Ugric and even Proto-Uralic, object pro-drop will be shown to be a sporadic phenomenon in Old Hungarian, spreading in Middle Hungarian, and becoming general only in the twentieth century. Recent results concerning the evolution of object–verb agreement also argue against its direct relation to object pro-drop. Object-agreement morphemes evolved from topic-doubling pronouns, and originally they encoded the topicality of the object in an SOV sentence. The present function of object–verb agreement is due to iterated exaptation. When the evolution of topic movement rendered its topic-marking role redundant, it was reanalysed as a marker of the definiteness of the object, and when the evolution of a system of articles rendered its definiteness-marking role redundant, it assumed the function of licensing object pro-drop.

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