Abstract:
The article investigates the diachronic development of complementisers in Hungarian, with particular stress on how complex complementisers were combined
from simplex ones. Using a minimalist
framework, I show that the processes can be explained by the relative cycle,
whereby original operators were reanalysed as complementiser heads,and were constrained by KAYNE’s Linear Correspondence Axiom,which determined the order of two elements in head adjunction. The analysis explains why configurations having two separate C heads X and Y had to disappear from the language, while the ones derived via movement and showing a YX order, could remain.
