Magyar Nyelvőr

Laczkó, Krisztina: The relationship between subject and predicate: subordination or coordination?
The aim of this paper is to clarify the issue raised in the title with respect to the subject/predicate relationship in Hungarian. In the relevant literature of recent years, the coordination view and that claiming the primacy of the predicate are represented side by side, in a mutually exclusive manner. The problem is based on the fact that two rather disparate subject/predicate constructions of Hungarian (Verbal predicate construction and complex predicate construction -- where the latter subsumes both what are called nominal an nominal-verbal predicates) are treated by the relevant theories under the same heading.
The author first confronts the two views with the issue of the argumenthood of subjects. It is clear that, in the case of verbal predicates, the subject is a lexically specified argument, whereas in the case of complex predicates the subject can only be seen as a structural argument. That duality leads to contradiction in both views, albeit in two different ways. On the basis of four tests -- agreement, question test, transformability, replacement by subordinate clause -- the author then goes on to prove that the two types of subject/predicate constructions behave differently. The final conclusion that can be drawn from the tests is that the verbal predicate construction exhibits a fully grammaticalised subordinate syntagmatic relationship, whereas in constructions involving complex predicates two kinds of relationships are simultaneously represented: a logical predicative one and a grammatical one. The logical predicative one is concerned the subject and the nominal part of the predicate, and two different kinds of grammatical relationships are found between the copula and the nominal part of the predicate (a grammatical relationship of the morphological kind) and between the subject and that morphological construction (a grammatical relationship of the syntactic kind). Thus, the syntactic character realised in a complex predicate is not a lexically given property.
In sum, it is clear that, due to the differences between the two types of predicates, the subject/predicate relationship of Hungarian cannot be described in a unified manner, under the same set of theoretical assumptions.