Surprise: Nonfinite Clause with Finite Complementizer

It has been common knowledge that the Hungarian complementizer hogy can only occur in finite clauses. Even though it started to occur c. 100 years ago in new contexts, such as in clauses accompanying sentence adverbials, nonfinite clauses were exempt from its occurrence. Recently, however, it began to be used in infinitival clauses. This squib offers an overview of related structures and initial analyses for its structure arguing that it fills a slot in a syntactic paradigm where verbs and adjectives can have both finite and infinitival complement clauses but nouns cannot since they only allow finite clauses. The new construction makes it possible for nouns to have infinitival complements, although with a twist: they must be accompanied by the finite complementizer thus making the resulting construction peculiar. We have also tested two populations by means of a questionnaire in order to investigate the acceptance scale of the construction as tabulated in the paper as based on an established statistical methodology.