Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

In recent classifications of Null Subject Languages  (NSL) (Egerland & Sigurdhsson 2009, Holmberg 2005, 2010), a language is automatically ranked as a Consistent NSL if it allows null subjects in finite clauses and requires strict co-reference between subordinate null subjects and their lexical antecedent. This paper argues that Hungarian differs from Consistent Null Subject Languages in important ways:

(i)    it allows expletive null subjects in meteorological sentences, as most Uralic languages do (see Salo 2010);

(ii)   it allows any argument to be null, as Radical Null Subject Languages do (Huang 1989);

(iii)  3SG null subjects are interpreted as generic inclusive only if they have a strictly co-referential lexical antecedent in an adjacent clause; without a strictly co-referential antecedent, they are interpreted with unique reference (Dalmi 2013, 2014). Alternation between the two is impossible. 

Generic inclusive arguments can be either lexical or null in Hungarian. The 3SG generic inclusive lexical DP az ember ‘the man’ corresponds to the free, first person-oriented, group-denoting occurrence of English one, while pro_GN is a variable that always requires a 3SG generic inclusive lexical antecedent in an adjacent clause. Thus, pro_GNis the counterpart of the bound variable occurrence of one/oneself in English (see Moltmann 2006, 2010, 2012).

3SG generic inclusive DPs must not be null in Consistent NSLs, and they are always null in Partial NSLs (see Holmberg 2005, 2010). This excludes Hungarian from these two major types of NSLs. Lack of alternation with unique reference DPs excludes Hungarian also from the Radical NSL class.