Lexical patterns in Hungarian vowel harmony

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.