The Hungarian Language: Past and Present

Long-distance agreement under focus movement in Hungarian, and its implications for locality theory

Marcel Den Dikken

The empirical focus of this paper is on long-distance agreement phenomena in Hungarian focus movement constructions. The paper addresses the question of how foci that extract from embedded clauses can come to establish an agreement and Case-checking relationship with the finite verb of the clause into which they move. The discussion puts the Hungarian facts in a cross-linguistic perspective by considering them against the background of similar phenomena from Passamaquoddy, Tagalog, and Tsez; it carefully considers the various theoretical options that are at our disposal when it comes to the analysis of the Hungarian facts; and it presents detailed analyses for the two ways in which long-distance focus fronting may proceed in the language: resumption and successive-cyclic extraction.

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