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INTRODUCTION TO EUROPEAN PARTITIVES IN COMPARISON
Note that in dialects, also the 3"! person form bennük(-et) [in(side).3PL-Acc]
exists.?6
So far, we have discussed the strategies that Hungarian — along with several
of its kindred languages — mainly employs in the morphosyntax of proper
partitive phrases. Some of the proper partitive subtypes, listed by Falco and
Zamparelli,*’ diverge from them. There is considerable variation also cross¬
linguistically, even between closely related languages, as to how one or another
subtype of the proper partitive phrase is encoded. Providing a list of the form¬
and-meaning correlations in the phrasal domain will be left for further study,
and we examine now two phenomena in the domain of sentences that relate
to the proper partitive concept.
One of the phenomena that interact with proper partitives in Hungarian is
verb agreement. In Hungarian, proper partitivity interacts both with object¬
verb agreement and with agreement in conventional possessive domains. The
basis for the interaction is the choice between default (or regular) and seman¬
tic (or irregular) agreement patterns: using the semantic, that is, the so-called
“disagreement” pattern, a partitive reading can be assigned to a formally
non-partitive construction.
Like several other Uralic languages, Hungarian has two verbal paradigms:
intransitive verbs and transitive verbs with indefinite objects take the so-called
subjective form, and transitive verbs with definite objects the so-called objective
form. Thus, objects like the one in (15a) trigger object agreement, since a
possessively inflected head noun is definite by default. In other words, the
default agreement pattern allows for both the ‘whole’ and the ‘part-of-the-whole’
reading (‘my three trees’ versus ‘three of my trees’), but with the disagreement
pattern (15b), the interpretation of the referent is partitive.**
(15) Hungarian (Finno-Ugric, Ugric)
a. Három fa-m-at kivág-ta.
three tree-1PL-ACC PV.cut-PST.3SG53
‘She has cut down my three trees / three of my trees!
b. Három fá-m-at kivág-ott.
three tree-1PL-ACC PV.cut-PST.3SG
"She has cut down three of my trees!
36 József Végh: A bennéket őket" jelentésben való használatáról [On the use of bennéket with the
meaning them], Magyar Nyelv 49 (1953), 171-3.
37 Falco — Zamparelli: Partitives.
38 Klemm: Magyar történeti mondattan, 123—4; Huba Bartos: Az inflexiós jelenségek szintaktikai
hättere [The Syntactic Background of Inflection Phenomenal, in F. Kiefer (ed.), Strukturdlis
magyar nyelvtan 3. Morfológia, Budapest, Akadémiai Kiadó, 2000, 747-752.
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