Morphological change as systemically motivated bricolage: Hungarian impulsative constructions

Abstract While many languages have voluntary desiderative constructions expressing the intention of an agent argument to engage in an activity or action, a few languages have dedicated impulsative constructions expressing an urge or feeling to engage in an activity or action. Hungarian has developed an impulsative construction by reanalyzing a series of individual verbal affixes associated with the morphosyntactic properties potential, conditional and agreement, for example sír-hat-n-ék ‘I could cry’, into a composite nominalizing affix which means ‘an urge to Verb’ as in the derived noun sír-hatnék ‘an urge to cry’. On the basis of historical corpora we argue that this construction emerges from the interaction of several large and otherwise independent systemic changes in Hungarian grammar as well as by commonly attested cross-linguistic conversational implicatures concerning modal markers.