verb agreement

[Edith A Moravcsik]

This is in response to Dunstan Brown's query regarding the possible
existence of languages where the verb agrees in definiteness with one of
its arguments.

It would seem that Hungarian is a language of this kind. Transitive verbs
have two inflectional paradigms. One is identical with the paradigm
of intransitive verbs and it is used when the direct object is indefinite.
The other paradigm is used when the direct object is definite. - It
should be noted that the notions "definite" and "indefinite" do not fully
match the corresponding semantic notions.

For example:

   - Intranstive verb: Iskola'ba ja'r-nak.
                       to:school go   3P
                       'They go to school.'

   - Transitive verb:
     -- indefinite object: Egy ko~nyvet olvas-nak.
                           a   book:ACC read  3P
                           'They are reading a book.'

     -- transitive object: A   ko~nyvet olvas-sa'k.
                           the book:ACC read  3P
                           'They are reading the book.'

(Diacritics should go over the preceding vowel; I used ~ for Umlaut.)

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			 Edith A. Moravcsik
			 Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics
			 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
		         Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413
                         USA

			 E-mail: edith at uwm.edu
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				    (414) 332-0141 /home/
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