2026/04/13 by Katalin É. Kiss · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
paper · doi:10.16995/glossa.26059
openalex publication_date 2026/04/13 · openalex created_date 2026/04/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/24
It is argued that the passive construction, common in the SOV Ob-Ugric sister languages of Hungarian displaying fused grammatical and discourse functions, was a frequent construction in Proto-Hungarian, as well, but its use gradually declined in the Old and Middle Hungarian periods, and it completely disappeared in the New Hungarian era. The attrition of passive voice is attributed to the growing opacity of the passive construction, and the existence of more transparent alternative patterns. It is shown that both components of passive inflection, the -(t)At causative morpheme and the unaccusative -ik subject agreement paradigm, were ambiguous in a wide range of cases, imposing additional cognitive load on the language user. However, theme promotion to topic role and agent focusing, performed via passivization in Ob-Ugric, could also be realized by active sentences displaying object topicalization and subject focusing in SVO Old Hungarian already. Agent demotion could be attained by three means, representing different levels of agent downgrading: (i) the impersonal construction, involving a 3PL plural verb and an existentially bound pro subject; (ii) the use of a detransitivizing suffix on the transitive verb; (iii) a -vA participle phrase + be-verb construction expressing the result state of the theme. It is claimed that these patterns could be learned more easily than the passive, which led to their gradual increase in the primary linguistic data determining the grammars of subsequent generations.