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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.
The article focuses on comparative complementisers in comparative clauses expressing inequality in various languages, with particular attention paid to their role as lexicalising negative polarity. I argue that the relevant property follows from degree semantics, in that the comparative subclause encodes the inequality of the degree expressed by a matrix clausal element and the one expressed by the comparative operator. Just like ordinary negation, this has to be encoded overtly; however, as it does not constitute an instance of genuine clausal negation, the property cannot be encoded by an operator, and hence must be realised on a functional head, which is either the complementiser or a separate polarity head.