Presenter
Péter Rácz, Cognitive Science Department of the Budapest University of Technology and Economy
Title
The natural history of Hungarian vowel harmony
Abstract
Natural phonological patterns, like reduction and assimilation, can be tied to mechanisms of articulation, perception, or transmission. Unnatural patterns, like the [k]~[s] alternation in “electric~electricity”, have no such grounding, yet speakers learn them and extend them to new words, to some extent — unnatural patterns are typologically rarer and learners acquire and generalise them less readily. Is this a bias in the learner, or an asymmetry in the input? I take up variable vowel harmony in Hungarian, a natural pattern with an unnatural twist, and show that its lexical conditioning tracks two records of the words’ history at once: their shapes, and the company they keep. Together these account for the pattern’s synchronic conditioning, and for the apparent learner bias — a new word arrives with a shape, but without company.