Natural and Unnatural Constraints in Hungarian Vowel Harmony

Hayes, Bruce; Siptár, Péter; Zuraw, Kie; Londe, Zsuzsa

doi:10.1353/lan.0.0169

Cited by 151 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 105 publications

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“…The previous experiment only compared vowels in adjacent and non-adjacent syllables, but natural languages distinguish at least one additional degree of distance. In Hungarian, for example, harmony across a single [i] as in (4) is obligatory; however, if multiple nonundergoers stand between trigger and target, harmony becomes variable (see Londe, 2006 andHayes et al, 2009 for further discussion).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One well-studied case of harmony resulting in non-adjacent surface dependencies is Hungarian palatal harmony (Vago, 1976;Kiparsky, 1981;Hayes & Londe, 2006;Hayes et al, 2009, and many others), which may apply across certain intervening vowels. The data in (3) illustrate the general process; suffix vowels alternate to agree with the stem, with front stems selecting a front suffix vowel and back stems selecting a back suffix vowel.…”

Section: Against Strict Localitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Not crazy after all these years? Perceptual grounding for long-distance vowel harmony

Kimper

2017

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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Long-distance (or 'transparent') vowel harmony systems have frequently been considered 'unnatural' and analyzed as 'crazy rules' (Bach & Harms, 1972) because they violate the principle of strict locality. Articulatory explanations for the phonetic grounding of vowel harmony are unable to extend to non-local processes, and attempts to re-analyze cases of transparent harmony as strictly local have been largely unsuccessful. In this paper, I present experimental evidence suggesting that vowel harmony may be perceptually (as well as articulatorily) grounded, and that this source of phonetic grounding does in fact extend to long-distance as well as local harmony. In a series of four experiments, subjects were presented with a nonsense word followed by an isolated vowel, and asked to report whether the isolated vowel had occurred in the preceding word. Subjects were consistently faster and more accurate in nonsense words which exhibited vowel harmony along the relevant feature dimension, regardless of locality. A fourth experiment included a task requiring subjects to identify whether the vowel occurred in a specific syllable, and here too they showed better performance on items with vowel harmony along the relevant feature dimension. I argue that strict locality is not a necessary component of a phonetically grounded theory of vowel harmony, suggesting that long-distance harmony can be analyzed as an explicitly non-local process without abandoning phonetic grounding.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Against Strict Localitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Not crazy after all these years? Perceptual grounding for long-distance vowel harmony

Kimper

2017

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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“…Unnatural connections, e.g. between consonant voicing and the backness of an adjacent vowel, are not learned (Becker et al 2011;2012) or learned weakly (Hayes et al 2009;Hayes & White 2013).…”

Section: Word-based Representations In the Arabic Lexiconmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vowel unpredictability in Hijazi Arabic monosyllabic verbs

Ahyad

Becker

2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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We study the distribution of vowels in the monosyllabic verbs of Urban Hijazi Arabic, showing that speakers use the presence of a root emphatic consonant to partially predict the quality of stem vowels. The effect of the emphatic is observed in the lexicon, and is productively extended to nonce verbs, showing that speakers generalize over lexical representations that include both vowels and consonants; the purely consonantal representations that are commonly assumed for Arabic are insufficient to capture speakers' knowledge of consonant-vowel interactions. We propose a probabilistic analysis that learns lexical trends from surface forms and extends them productively to nonce words.

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“…They can almost completely ignore any further information that derives from substance as being unreliable. This explains why in many experiments adults reflect the lexical proportions in inflections of novel words (Ernestus and Baayen, 2003), leaving only very little evidence for the presence of a bias for substantively based alternations (Albright and Hayes, 2003; Zhang and Lai, 2008, 2010; Hayes et al, 2009; Zuraw, 2010). It is interesting that the proportion of both alternations produced by adults in the nonces is similar and that the proportion of both alternations in the corpora is also the same.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing biases

Vijver

Baer-Henney

2014

Front. Psychol.

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German nouns may alternate from singular to plural in two different ways. Some singular forms that end in a voiceless obstruent have a plural in which this obstruent is voiced. Another alternation concerns the vowel. Some singular forms with a back vowel have a plural form in which this back vowel is front. For each noun it has to be established individually whether it alternates or not. The voicing alternation is phonetically grounded, but the vowel alternation is not. Knowledge about such alternations involves two things. First, it involves knowledge of which words alternate and which words do not and second, it involves the ability to extend the alternations to novel words. We studied the knowledge of which words alternate and the proportion to which they alternate in two corpus studies. We studied the knowledge of speakers concerning which words alternate and what generalizations can be based upon these words by means of a production study. The production study involved words and nonces. We asked twenty 5 year-olds, twenty 7 year-olds, and ten adults to produce the plural for a given singular word and a plural for a given singular nonce. In the corpus study we found that both alternations occur with the same frequency. In the production of alternations in words we found that participants in all age groups make few mistakes. With respect to the production of alternations in nonce words, we found that the proportion of voicing alternations decreases with age, while the proportion of vowel alternations increases. We explain this change in the ability to generalize the alternations to nonces on the basis of the confidence speakers can have in a generalization. Young children have a small lexicon and they can form relatively unreliable generalizations on lexical distributions. They are, however, proficient users of language and have great phonetic experience. They can more confidently form generalizations on the basis of this experience. Adults have a large lexicon and, as a consequence, they can confidently form generalizations based on their lexicon. In addition, they know that many alternations are not based on phonetic considerations.

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Natural and Unnatural Constraints in Hungarian Vowel Harmony

Cited by 151 publications

References 105 publications

Not crazy after all these years? Perceptual grounding for long-distance vowel harmony

Not crazy after all these years? Perceptual grounding for long-distance vowel harmony

Vowel unpredictability in Hijazi Arabic monosyllabic verbs

Developing biases

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