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In:Approaches to Hungarian: Volume 16: Papers from the 2017 Budapest Conference
Edited by Veronika Hegedűs and Irene Vogel
[Approaches to Hungarian 16] 2020
► pp. 97–114

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Testing variability effects in Hungarian vowel harmony

 | MTA Research Institute for Linguistics
 | Eötvös Loránd University | MTA Research Institute for Linguistics
 | Department of Cognitive Science, Budapest University of Technology and Economics | MTA-BME Lendület Language Acquisition Research Group
 | MTA Research Institute for Linguistics
 | Eötvös Loránd University | MTA Research Institute for Linguistics
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 8 April 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/atoh.16.05pat
Abstract
Hungarian backness harmony shows various degrees of transparency and variation, but the empirical testing of these variability effects in corpora is problematic because of data sparseness. We have created an experiment using harmonically mixed stems and four different harmonic suffixes, and collected information about the variants from native speakers in the form of a sentence completion task. We show that there are significant differences between stem types, and that the harmonic suffix can also affect the behaviour of the stem. Our results confirm that native speakers can learn unnatural patterns and that they obey the Law of Frequency Matching (Hayes et al. 2009).
Article outline
  • 1.Harmony
  • 2.Experiment
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Stimuli
    • 2.3Method and procedure
    • 2.4Results
      • 2.4.1Results by generalized type – Count Effect
      • 2.4.2Height Effect
      • 2.4.3Cumulativity 1
      • 2.4.4Cumulativity 2
      • 2.4.5Comparisons of C-final vs V-final roots
  • 3.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (16)
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Törkenczy, Miklós
2016. Hungarian Vowel Harmony. In Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics, DOI logo

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