Syntactic relations within the adpositional phrase (Hungarian)

Adp=NNonGov: Adpositions do not behave like verbs. Their complements appear in base form without inflection.

Adp=NGov: Adpositions do not behave like verbs. Their complements appear in various cases depending on the particular adposition in question.


(1) a szoba közep-é-n

the room middle-3sg-sup

‘in the middle of the room’


(2) a nyírfá-nak mellett-e

the birch_tree-dat next_to-3sg

‘next to the birch tree’


(3) (én)mellett-em

(I)next_to-1sg

‘next to me’


(4) má-tól fogva

today-abl from

‘from now on’


(5) velem szemben

I.com opposite

‘opposite to me’


In Hungarian, the noun complements of adpositions are always in their base forms. Adpositions can only take personal suffixes if their complement is a personal pronoun in the nominative case (3). Sometimes, the complement (which is typically in the nominative case) takes a dative suffix and the adposition gets a personal possessive suffix (2). This construction was more prevalent in previous stages of the language (D. Mátai 2003b:  416‒418). In Modern Hungarian, the so-called “case-attracting” postpositions require the appearance of an oblique case on the noun complement of the postposition (4)-(5) (Balogh 2000c,  Dér 2012).

Author: 

Nikolett F. Gulyás