3 - The minimal predicate

Summary

Having assigned to the Hungarian sentence a binary predication structure, and having examined the properties of the logical subject of predication, or topic, we turn to the analysis of the predicate phrase. Categorially the predicate is a VP merged with morphosyntactic elements such as tense, mood, and agreement, and either extended into an aspectual phrase, or embedded in operator projections such as a focus phrase, a distributive quantifier phrase, and/or a negative phrase. The subject of this chapter is the minimal predicate, consisting of a VP, merged with morphosyntactic heads, and extended into an AspP, but not involving a focus, a distributive quantifier, or negation.

Argument order in the VP

The lexical core of the predicate of the Hungarian sentence is a verb phrase. It is assumed to be verb initial, with the arguments following the verb in an arbitrary order – as illustrated in (1). (What motivated the assumption of a verb-initial VP in the late 1970s was that the set of possible permutations of a verb and its complements could be derived most economically from a V-initial base. Later theoretical considerations – concerning the direction of theta-role assignment and Case assignment in Universal Grammar – also confirmed this view.)