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ADDITIONAL ARGUMENTS FOR THE POSSESSOR ROLE OF THE INFINITIVAL COMPLEMENT OF 'IDEJE' ('IT IS TIME')

100%
Sz-Hegedus R.
Magyar Nyelvor (Hungarian Language Guardian)
|
2005
|
vol. 129
|
issue 3
363-381
EN
The construction Ideje indulni! 'It is time to leave' is a sentence of possession containing a deleted copula. The deletion involved is probably due to analogy: the verbal part (copula) of a third person singular present indicative complex predicate is deleted, except for emphatic utterances. This parallel has an effect on other types of sentences, too (e.g., Itt a postas 'The postman's here'). Ideje indulni is a sentence of possession because it contains a possessive construction interrupted by the (null) copula. The presence of a possessor is required by the possessive suffix of ideje 'it is time' as an obligatory argument. There are two possibilities: this role is either fulfilled by the other word in the sentence (indulni 'to leave'), or else it is present in a deleted (but suppliable) form, just like the copula. If we insert a non-null possessor in the sentence (the pronoun neki 'for him'), we end up with another construction, one with a different argument structure 'somebody has time for something / to do something'. Our original sentence has a meaning that is incompatible with this, and a different argument structure: 'it is the time of something / time to do something'. Hence, the possessor role is fulfilled by the infinitive itself. The question arises on what grounds we can posit a possessor (possessive attribute) in a sentence of possession - rather than a dative possessor that the earlier assumptions took to occur in such sentences. The paper tries to answer that question. In the author's argumentation, what is new is the assumption that Ideje indulni is a sentence of possession: traditional descriptive grammar assumed that a sentence of possession invariably involves a dative possessor. Nevertheless, the detailed investigation supports the claim that the infinitive is a possessive attribute here.
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