On diachronic variation and change of aligha ‘unlikely’ and alighanem ‘probably’: from low intensity to epistemic modality

This paper investigates changes in the distribution of the Hungarian epistemic and inferential modifiers aligha ‘unlikely’ and alighanem ‘probably’. Before the late 19th century, aligha predominantly expressed high probability which was syntactically marked by a negative particle (as a case of double negation). In Modern Hungarian, however, it primarily marks the negative pole by default, being incompatible with affirmative responses – which is an atypical feature among Hungarian modifiers. The extensive analysis of historical data, covering sources from the 16th to the mid-20th century, highlights that the structural characteristics of the host sentences containing aligha have also changed. Before the late 19th century, when aligha appeared in affirmative sentences, the predicate displayed neutral word order, whereas in Standard Modern Hungarian aligha triggers inversion between the verb and the verbal prefix. The study compares and contrasts functional variants in order to find plausible motivations for the observed changes.