Trochaic proper government, loose CV, and vowel ~ zero alternation in Hungarian

In this article, I analyze Hungarian vowel ~ zero alternation in a loose CV framework, employing left-to-right proper government, building on previous work (Polgárdi 1998, 2002, 2003), combining Government Phonology (GP) with Optimality Theory. I propose a syncope analysis, where alternating vowels are not empty underlyingly (as is customary in GP), but they are marked in the lexicon as properly governable. This approach is supported by an analysis of Turkish, where high vowels alternate with zero, which are traditionally regarded as segmentally empty. Yet they need to be marked lexically, because only some of them alternate, within a closed class of stems.

Published online: 19 November 2009
https://doi.org/10.1075/atoh.11.07pol