Agreement, Coordination, and Ellipsis: Forms and Core Pattern

Hungarian agreement follows grammatical number and person, not merely the number of individuals in the real world. A quantified noun is singular after a numeral, a coordinated subject permits patterns sensitive to position and interpretation, and polite ön/önök selects third-person forms. Ellipsis can leave repeated predicates or noun heads unspoken, but their morphology and meaning must be recoverable from parallel structure.

Ordinary and quantified subjects

With an ordinary plural subject, the finite verb and a predicative adjective are plural. After a numeral or quantity word, however, the noun stays singular and normally triggers singular agreement.

Segment öt vendég megérkezett as five guest.SG arrive.PST.3SG. Hungarian avoids redundant plural -k after a cardinal and follows the visible singular noun with singular agreement. English plural guests/applicants is therefore a poor guide.

Coordinated singular subjects

Two singular noun phrases joined by és denote a plural group, but agreement is not uniformly mechanical. With animate coordinated subjects established as a topic, plural agreement is the clearest neutral choice:

Singular agreement is also possible in Hungarian with coordinated singular subjects, especially when the conjuncts remain close to the predicate, are postverbal, or are construed as a single combined situation. Position, animacy, definiteness, and information structure influence acceptability.

Here singular megérkezett agrees locally with the first postverbal conjunct in a presentational clause. Plural megérkeztek is also possible and highlights the pair as a plural group. This variation is genuine; the safe choice for a preverbal human topic like Nóra és Bálint is plural.

When coordinated pronouns have different persons, the inclusive group controls plural person agreement:

First person outranks second and third because the group includes the speaker; second person outranks third when the speaker is excluded: te és ő kezdtek “you and he/she start.”

Polite pronouns

Singular ön and maga, and plural önök and maguk, refer to the addressee but take third-person agreement. Ön is standard polite and especially common in formal service and institutional language; maga is relationship-sensitive and can sound intimate, distancing, or rude in the wrong context.

The verb választja is third-person singular definite, not second-person választod. Predicate elégedettek is plural because önök is morphologically plural. Capitalized Ön/Önök occurs in respectful correspondence, while lowercase is standard in continuous text; capitalization does not alter agreement.

Predicate adjective agreement

An attributive adjective before a noun is invariant, whereas a predicative adjective agrees in number with its subject.

Részletes modifies plural válaszok but remains unmarked. Coordinated predicate adjectives pontosak and követhetők each bear plural -k. With a quantified singular subject, both are singular:

Vowel harmony and linking vowels operate inside each agreeing word: pontos-ak, érthető-k, hasznos-ak. Review Adjective Agreement for stem-specific formation.

Repeating suffixes and sharing a head

A case suffix is normally attached to every coordinated noun that it governs:

Neutral standard Hungarian does not let -en on Szegeden take wide scope over bare Budapest és Szeged. By contrast, coordinated modifiers may share one overt head, and the head carries the case suffix once:

Here the hyphen marks the omitted shared compound element politika: the fully expanded phrase is a külpolitikában és a belpolitikában. The case suffix surfaces on the overt shared compound tail. This lexical compound pattern does not license dropping case from ordinary separate nouns such as Budapest and Szeged.

Gapping in coordinated clauses

When two parallel clauses contrast corresponding constituents, the repeated finite predicate can be omitted from the second conjunct.

The second conjunct is understood as Péter teát kért. The overt remnants contrast subject with subject and object with object. Their cases make the missing relation recoverable.

The gap includes utazik in the appropriate third-person form; ellipsis recovers the lexical predicate and supplies agreement appropriate to Júlia. Hungarian does not literally pronounce an ending without a stem in this construction.

Recoverable argument and head ellipsis

Pro-drop omits a subject licensed by the finite ending and context. Definite-object ellipsis is also possible when the object is salient and definiteness remains visible on the verb.

The object is absent, but definite elolvastam points back to a jelentést. Adjectives and determiners can likewise stand for an understood noun and then carry the noun phrase's number and case:

Nagyobb-at bears accusative case because the omitted noun is recoverable. This is not free deletion: without a salient class of boxes, a nagyobbat would require contextual support.

Segmentation exercise

Identify what is overt and what is recovered.

1. három kutató érkezett → three researcher.SG arrive.PST.3SG; the numeral licenses singular noun and verb.
2. Anna és Leó megérkeztek → two singular conjuncts form a topical plural group; -tek is plural agreement.
3. Önök készen állnak → polite addressee.PL + ready + stand.3PL; grammar remains third person.
4. Márk almát választott, Éva pedig körtét → the second clause recovers választott.
5. a pirosat kérem → piros-at carries the accusative that the understood noun phrase requires.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Agreement follows Hungarian grammatical form: quantified singular differs from overt plural.
• Topical coordinated humans favor plural agreement; postverbal coordination permits genuine variation.
• Polite ön/önök always selects third-person grammar.
• Predicate adjectives agree; attributive adjectives do not.
• Repeat case suffixes on coordinated nouns unless one genuinely shared head carries the morphology.
• Use gapping only when parallel remnants and context make the missing predicate recoverable.