the objective conjugation in hungarian: agreement without phi-features

verbal agreement is normally in person, number and gender, but hungarian verbs agree with their objects in definiteness instead: a hungarian verb appears in the objective conjugation when it governs a definite object. the sensitivity of the objective conjugation suffixes to the definiteness of the object has been attributed to the supposition that they function as incorporated object pronouns (szamosi 1974; den dikken 2006), but we argue instead that they are agreement markers registering the object’s formal, not semantic, definiteness. evidence comes from anaphoric binding, null anaphora (pro-drop), extraction islands, and the insensitivity of the objective conjugation to any of the factors known to condition the use of affixal and clitic pronominals.