A -hAtÓ toldalék rejtélye

É. Kiss, Katalin (2025) A -hAtÓ toldalék rejtélye. NYELVTUDOMÁNYI KÖZLEMÉNYEK, 121. pp. 47-63. ISSN 0029-6791

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Abstract

The suffix -hAtÓ (büntet-hető ‘punish-able’) is a combination of the potential morpheme -hAt (büntet-het ‘can punish’), and the present participle suffix -Ó (büntet-ő ‘punish-ing’). Unexpectedly, neither the selectional, nor the distributional properties of -hAtÓ can be derived from the properties of its components. Whereas both of these suffixes can merge with unaccusative, unergative, and transitive verbs alike, -hAtÓ can only be complemented by passivized transitive verbs. Whereas V-Ó participles not lexicalized as adjectives cannot, V-hAtÓ combinations can occur as predicates or predicate complements of tensed clauses. The paper argues that V-hAtÓ borrowed its unexpected properties analogically from its antonym, V-hAtAtlAn (olvashatatlan ‘unreadable’), containing the potential suffix -hAt and the suffix -tlAn, a privative morpheme. Analogical effects arise if the source category is more frequent than the target. In Modern Hungarian, V-hAtÓ is significantly more common than V-hAtAtlAn. However, as the paper documents, V-hAtÓ proliferated in Hungarian several centuries later than V-hAtAtlAn, i.e., its greater frequency is a relatively recent development.

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