Monotonicity and the limits of disharmony
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3765/amp.v2i0.3769Keywords:
Hungarian, Vowel Harmony, Neutral Vowels, Transparency, Anti-Harmony, Variation, Paradigm Uniformity, MonotonicityAbstract
The attested front/back harmony systems are monotonic in the sense that the harmony function that assigns the values front and back to suffixes in given harmonic stem contexts is subject to a constraint that only permits contiguous patterns of values on a universally fixed scale of harmonic contexts (ranging from the prototypical back harmony context [...B]_ to the prototypical front one [...F]_ ). We argue that monotonicity also constrains variation (harmony patterns involving the harmonic value front/back) and show that in Hungarian the harmonic properties of a stem (front, back, variable front/back) are inherited by the forms derived from the stem by inflection or derivation. This paradigm uniformity effect (Harmonic Uniformity) results in subpatterns of front/back harmony which also conform to monotonicity. We demonstrate this using frequency data from a corpus study.Downloads
Published
2016-06-01
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Supplemental Proceedings
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Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 3.0 license.