Lexical patterns in Hungarian vowel harmony
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Péter Rácz
and
Péter Rebrus
Abstract
Hungarian shows variable front vowel harmony, particularly in suffixed back vowel + [ɛ] nouns. The study aims to address two main research questions: (1) To what extent does stem-level information (similarity across stems) predict suffix variation for back vowel + [ɛ] stems in Hungarian corpus data? (2) Do suffixes themselves predict suffix variation beyond the stem-level information? We draw on a dataset of 200 noun stems, 4,501 suffixed forms and 4 × 106 tokens, based on the New Hungarian Webcorpus, and use a K-Nearest Neighbours learner and a hierarchical generalised linear model to address these questions. We find that the majority of back vowel + [ɛ] stems show variable vowel harmony, that this depends on stem similarity and that similarity effects are amplified by vowel-initial suffixes. This points to a model of Hungarian vowel harmony in which stem- and suffix-level information are lexically specified.
Funding source: Nemzeti Kutatási, Fejlesztési és Innovaciós Alap
Award Identifier / Grant number: OTKA-138188
Award Identifier / Grant number: OTKA-139271
Award Identifier / Grant number: NKFI-K139271
Award Identifier / Grant number: NKFI-FK138188
Award Identifier / Grant number: TKP2021-EGA-02
Funding source: Innovációs és Technológiai Minisztérium
Award Identifier / Grant number: TKP2023-NVA-2
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to our Editor, our Reviewers and Vásárhelyi Dani.
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Conflicts of interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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Research funding: This research was supported by grants NKFI-K139271, NKFI-FK138188, TKP2021-EGA-02, OTKA-138188 and OTKA-139271 by the Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Fund. This was also supported by grant TKP2023-NVA-2 by Innovációs és Technológiai Minisztérium.
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