Object-drop in Hungarian

In this paper the issue of Hungarian object-drop is presented. It has been stated in the literature that object pronouns are allowed to be dropped only in singular (Farkas 1987, Puskás 2000). This paper, however, explores the possibility of omitting the plural object pronouns. An experiment with acceptability judgment task was conducted concerning plural object-drop. The results show that first and second person plural object pronouns can be dropped ? though omitting the second person is more degraded, while third person object pronoun must always be pronounced. The semantic features of pronouns are [speaker], [hearer] and [PL]. There is a hierarchy between the features: speaker>hearer>PL (Harley & Ritter, 2002).The omission of the pronoun is allowed if its semantic content can be recovered. Features that are lower in the hierarchy are more difficult to recover, thus second plural pronoun is degraded and third is unacceptable to omit.