A BMRS analysis of Trojan (and transparent) vowels in Hungarian vowel harmony

Abstract

A ‘Trojan’ vowel in a vowel harmony system is a vowel that spreads an underlyingly specified value of the spreading feature even though the Trojan vowel itself redundantly surfaces with the opposite value. We propose an analysis of Trojan vowels with Boolean Monadic Recursive Schemes (BMRS; Chandlee & Jardine 2021), a computational formalism describing phonological maps using conditional IF . . . THEN . . . ELSE . . . terms. We show how a BMRS analysis of Trojan vowel behavior in Hungarian follows straightforwardly when coupled with freely-specified input strings. Our analysis also accounts for the fact that redundantly-specified Trojan vowels in Hungarian are transparent in other contexts, and we briefly contrast this with the situation in Yoruba where Trojan vowels are otherwise opaque.