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INTRODUCTION TO EUROPEAN PARTITIVES IN COMPARISON
It is argued that such development took place earlier also in Hungarian: the spe¬
cific nominalizer suffix -ik, which appears attached to pronoun bases like the
ones in Table 1, is considered to have evolved from the 3" person plural possessive
suffix,”” turning into a subset marker applied on the quantifier constituents of
canonical partitive phrases. Similar processes are reported also from other Uralic
languages.
Let us point out two more differences between Hungarian and Mari proper
partitive constructions. The first of them concerns the distribution of the subset¬
marked constructions across syntactic roles: in Hungarian, subset-marked
constructions with ik-less quantifiers (based on numerals like ‘two’ or ‘many’)
tend to avoid the subject function, becoming replaced with collective quantifiers
(which bear a modal-essive marker and trigger plural agreement) (12), while
in Mari, this is not the case (13). Thus, in Hungarian, subset-marked partitives,
or at least some of them, are in complementary distribution with collectives.
(12) Hungarian (Finno-Ugric, Ugric)
[..]
Közül-ük kett-en megbuktak. / ??Kettö-jük megbukott.
from-3PL two-MODESS Pv.fail.PST.3PL / two-3pL Pv.fail.PST.3sG
‘[Twenty students took the exam.] Two of them failed!
(13) Mari (Finno-Ugric, Volgaic)
L.J
Student gyé kokyt-so provalitl-en.
student.[NoM.sG] from two-3sG fail-2PST.3sG
‘(Twenty students took the exam.] Two of the students failed’ (Elena
Vedernikova, pers. comm.)
The other difference concerns the case that appears on the element that stands
for the superset (“superset-marker”). Both languages use either source (separa¬
tive) cases or postpositions with source (separative) meanings for superset¬
marking. Hungarian has the elative case as in (1b) or the postposition koziil as
27 Katalin E. Kiss: Possessive Agreement Turned into a Derivational Suffix, in H. Bartos — M.
Den Dikken - T. Väradi (eds.), Boundaries Crossed, at the Interfaces of Morphosyntax, Phonology,
Pragmatics, and Semantics. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 94, Dordrecht,
Springer, 2018, 87-105. https://doi.org/10.0007/978-3-319-90710-9_6
See, e.g., Katalin E. Kiss - Orsolya Tanczos: From Possessor Agreement to Object Marking
in the Evolution of the Udmurt -jez Suffix: A Grammaticalization Approach to Morpheme
Syncretism, Language, 94(4) (2018), 733-57. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.0.0233; Irina Nikolaeva:
A Grammar of Tundra Nenets, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 2014, 69.
?° On the other hand, Marialso has a type of subset-marked construction (a possessively inflected
quantifier in morphological terms) which is incompatible with subjecthood, see Timothy Riese
— Jeremy Bradley — Tatiana Yefremova: Mari. (Mapuü üviame.) An essential grammar for
international learners. Vienna: Koneen Säätiö, 2022, 115, https://mari-language.univie.ac.at/
grammar/eg2022.pdf. (Accessed 15 August 2023)
+ 21°