| Summary: | This paper argues that the reconstruction of the featural content of functional projections is possible, and the method to be employed is a version of the comparative method, where the correspondence set consists of the features licensed by the same functional head across related languages. Linguistic fossils bearing imprints of agreement relations in earlier periods of the given language are also potential sources of reconstruction. This is illustrated by a case study reconstructing object marking in Proto-Ugric, and somewhat more tentatively, in Proto-Uralic. It is argued that the Uralic parent language had differential object-verb agreement licensed by a TP-external Obj head with a [+topic] feature. Accusative assignment was licensed under the same conditions; it was another manifestation of the agreement relation between the object and the Obj head, i.e., Obj was specified as [+topic] and [+accusative]. The [+topic] feature of Obj has been reanalysed as [+specific] in Udmurt, and as [+definite] in Hungarian. In Hungarian and Tundra Nenets, accusative assignment has been generalized to all objects, i.e., the [+topic] and [+accusative] features have been divorced, and accusative case has come to be associated with v.
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