Page 23 [23]
OCR
INTRODUCTION TO EUROPEAN PARTITIVES IN COMPARISON It is argued that such development took place earlier also in Hungarian: the specific 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 subsetmarked 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 (separative) cases or postpositions with source (separative) meanings for supersetmarking. 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°
