T
he natural history of Hungarian vowel harmony
Abstr
act
Natural phonological patterns\, like reduction and assimi
lation\, can be tied to mechanisms of articulation\, perception\, or transm
ission. Unnatural patterns\, like the [k]~[s] alternation in "electric~elec
tricity"\, have no such grounding\, yet speakers learn them and extend them
to new words\, to some extent -- unnatural patterns are typologically rare
r 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 harmon
y 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 pa
ttern's synchronic conditioning\, and for the apparent learner bias -- a ne
w word arrives with a shape\, but without company.