Edited by Veronika Hegedűs and Irene Vogel
[Approaches to Hungarian 16] 2020
► pp. 97–114
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).
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