On the Diachronic Development of a Hungarian Declarative Complementiser
- My paper investigates the diachronic development of the Modern Hungarian finite declarative complementiser hogy ‘COMP’. In Old Hungarian, hogy could be combined with other complementisers, e.g. mint ‘than/as’, giving configurations like hogymint and minthogy, that is, complementiser combinations in general are attested both in the hogy+X and the reverse X+hogy orders, X standing for an unspecified complementiser. The rich variation of Old Hungarian complex complementisers is not fully reflected in Modern Hungarian: it is invariably only one of the orders that survived. I will show that it is always the one that fully grammaticalised into a single C head; this is ultimately tied to the original underlying order of hogy and X as separate C heads. I will also demonstrate that hogy came to be used as a general marker of finite subordination.
