Rákosi György's paper in Journal of Uralic Linguistics | Institute of English and American Studies

Link to paper

Abstract
Hungarian reflexives and 1sg and 2sg object pronouns have a possessive origin, and, together with 1sg and 2sg possessive noun phrases, they exhibit accusative case drop to varying degrees in object positions in a language that is otherwise consistently accusative marking. This paper argues that there is a systematic correlation between the frequency of accusative drop and the degree of grammaticalization in the possessive domain: the more grammaticalized possessive structure a reflexive or an object pronoun has, the less likely accusative case is to be spelled out. Following É. Kiss & Mus (2022), accusative drop is analysed as an instance of exaptation, that is, a case of repurposing possessive morphology as accusative marking. The paper presents evidence from diachronic and synchronic corpora to argue that this analysis makes the right predictions both for the historical changes that have taken place in this domain, and for the fine-grained variation in accusative use on reflexives in the synchronic system.