Double Agreement: Role Identification in Hungarian

Abstract

In Hungarian, distinguishing subjects and objects in transitive clauses requires the processing of five m ajor types of cues: subject-verb agreement-marking, object-verb agreement-marking, case-marking, anim acy and word order. Two studies examined the relative strength of these cues in a sentence interpretation task. Because Hungarian has a “double agreement-marking” system, it was possible to compare the relative strengths of the two types of agreement-marking. Despite the fact that object-verb agreement is a fully deterministic grammatical marker, the studies showed that this type of agreement has a very weak impact on sentence processing. This weakness is dem onstrated in two experiments, the first using only sentences with definite objects and the second varying the definiteness of the object. The weakness of the object-verb cue is attributed to its lower contrast availability. The preservation of this marking in the Hungarian language is testimony to the diachronic tenacity of morphological markings when they become em bedded in complex grammatical paradigms.