hungarian pronominal case and the dichotomy of content and form in inflectional morphology

hungarian nouns take some seventeen or so suffixal case inflections, e.g. ház ‘house (nominative)’ ∼ ház-ban ‘in a house (inessive)’. personal pronouns have corresponding case-marked forms but these are not formed by means of suffixal case inflections. instead, postposition-like stems expressing the individual cases are inflected for each pronoun’s person and number in exactly the same way that nouns inflect for possessor agreement or true postpositions inflect for a pronominal complement (inessive benn-e ‘in him’, benn-ük ‘in them; cf. könyv-e ‘his book’, könyv-ük ‘their book’ from the noun könyv; mögött-e ‘behind him’, mögött-ük ‘behind them’ from the postposition mögött). this manner of case marking embodies a highly unusual pattern of ‘functor-argument reversal’, which is problematic for many models of morphosyntax.