Hungarian numerals and quantifiers carrying the -an/-en suffix

What is it about?

An interesting Hungarian numeral construction involves numerals carrying the -an/en suffix (henceforth NUM-AN). NUM-AN occurs alone, with no nominal following it, and refers to a plurality of human individuals. The interesting factor in these constructions is that in Hungarian, cardinal numerals higher than one combine with morphologically singular nouns. While in number-noun numerical expressions, semantic plurality is indicated by the numeral, the DP is morphologically singular and induces singular verbal agreement (Három fiú ment át a vizsgán). Since the DP is morphologically singular, plural inflection does not co-occur with nouns modified by cardinals. However, NUM-AN triggers plural verbal agreement in a similar manner to bare plural nouns (Hárman mentek át a vizsgán). Manifestations of the plural number marking in NUM-AN expressions are unexpected and raise questions both about the reasons behind plural agreement and about the meaning of NUM-AN, questions which are answered in this article.

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Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This work provides the most detailed discussion of -AN marked numerals in Hungarian to date, and it offers the first semantic analysis of these phrases. My findings show how the ordinary plural marker and -AN marked numerals contrast in their morpho-syntactic properties, and highlight a distinction between semantic and morpho-syntactic plurality. I further show that that -AN expressions always associate to a pronoun, which can be dropped.