Papers on Hungarian Vowel Harmony
| The Hungarian vowel harmony system is fascinating for its blend of disparate
influences. On top of a relatively straightforward system of backness
assimilation is overlaid a great number of additional complexities, involving
free variation, idiosyncratic behavior of particular lexical items, and
peripheral phonological constraints of the kind that Bach and Harms (1972)
called "crazy". The system is an ideal arena for applying and honing
tools of phonological theory whose use is currently spreading throughout
the field: corpus study, experimentation, quantitative constraint-based
models, and algorithms for learning. These methods are used in both
of the papers below.
I've enjoyed doing this work as part of an excellent research team whose
members share expertise in experimentation, modeling, theory, and the phonology
of Hungarian.
|
Map of Hungary showing where our experimental participants came from.
The large dot is Budapest. |
Stochastic
Phonological Knowledge: The Case of Hungarian Vowel
Harmony
by Bruce Hayes and Zsuzsa Cziráky Londe
Preprint version. Published in Phonology 23:59-104 (2006).
Abstract
In Hungarian, stems ending in a back vowel plus one or more neutral vowels
show unusual behavior: for such stems, the otherwise-general process of vowel
harmony is lexically idiosyncratic. Particular stems can take front suffixes,
take back suffixes, or vacillate. Yet at a statistical level, the patterning
among these stems is lawful: in the aggregate, they obey principles that
relate the propensity to take back or front harmony to the height of the
rightmost vowel and to the number of neutral vowels.
We argue that this patterned statistical variation in the Hungarian lexicon
is internalized by native speakers. Our evidence is that they replicate the
pattern when they are asked to apply harmony to novel stems in a "wug" test
(Berko 1958). Our test results match quantitative data about the Hungarian
lexicon, gathered with an automated Web search. We model the speakers' knowledge
and intuitions with a grammar based on the dual listing/generation model
of Zuraw (2000), then show how the constraint rankings of this grammar can
be learned by algorithm.
Supporting files
Natural and Unnatural Constraints
in Hungarian Vowel Harmony,
by Bruce Hayes, Kie Zuraw, Péter Siptár, and Zsuzsa Londe
Language 85: 822-863 (2009)
Abstract
Phonological constraints can, in principle, be classified according to whether
they are natural (founded in principles of Universal Grammar (UG)) or unnatural
(arbitrary, learned inductively from the language data). Recent work has
used this distinction as the basis for arguments about the role of UG in
learning. Some languages have phonological patterns that arguably reflect
unnatural constraints. With experimental testing, one can assess whether
such patterns are actually learned by native speakers. Becker, Ketrez, and
Nevins (2007), testing speakers of Turkish, suggest that they do indeed go
unlearned. They interpret this result with a strong UG position: humans are
unable to learn data patterns not backed by UG principles.
This article pursues the same research line, locating similarly unnatural
data patterns in the vowel harmony system of Hungarian, such as the tendency
(among certain stem types) for a final bilabial stop to favor front harmony.
Our own test leads to the opposite conclusion to Becker et al.: Hungarians
evidently do learn the unnatural patterns.
To conclude we consider a bias account-that speakers are able to learn unnatural
environments, but devalue them relative to natural ones. We outline a method
for testing the strength of constraints as learned by speakers against the
strength of the corresponding patterns in the lexicon, and show that it offers
tentative support for the hypothesis that unnatural constraints are disfavored
by language learners.
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the paper
(pdf format)
Typo: p. 830, maradék(nat) should be
maradék(nak) 'remainder-dat' (already fixed in the downloadable
version given here).
Supporting files