Overabundance in Hungarian accusative pronouns

Overabundance is defined as the situation in which more than one inflected form is available to realize a single cell of an inflectional paradigm (Thornton 2011, 2012). Hungarian pronominal paradigms host several cases of overabundance in the accusative forms. Quantitative data from both diachronic and synchronic corpora are presented, showing that 1/2/3sg.acc forms have an unbalanced distribution while 1pl.acc and 2pl.acc forms have a very balanced distribution, close to a 1:1 ratio between the two competing forms. One of the factors mentioned in the literature as favoring one of the two 1pl.acc and 2pl.acc forms, i.e., usage in emphatic / focus position, is illustrated and briefly discussed on the basis of corpus data.