The morphosyntax of the Hungarian sociative and dissociative suffixes

Abstract

This paper examines the morphosyntax of (dis)sociative ‘with(out)’, with particular reference to the facts of Hungarian but with an eye towards universality. The morphological analysis of -stul/stül ‘with’ and -talanul/telenül ‘without’ unpacks these complex forms, utilizing a variety of morphemes treated as heads of phrases in the syntax; the syntax, in turn, represents (dis)sociatives as depictive secondary predications, with a PRO-subject controlled by either the subject or the object of the containing clause. The morphophonology and semantics of sociative -stul and dissociative -talanul unfold compositionally from the syntactic structure. The analysis of (dis)sociatives reveals the benefits of composing complex word-level formatives in syntax, shows that snowballing head movement and phrasal movement are two discrete strategies for syntactic word formation, and sheds new light on several grammatical formatives and their interactions.