On Hungarian morphology

Zborník príspevkov zo 7. ročníka Jarnej školy doktorandov UPJŠ , 2020

Zborník príspevkov zo 7. ročníka Jarnej školy doktorandov UPJŠ 256 Abstract: The primary aim of this paper is to define the place of evaluative morphology within the system of morphology. The first chapter of the paper discusses the issue of fuzzy boundaries between inflection and derivation and deals with three lists of criteria. The goal of the second chapter is to find the place of evaluative morphology based on the analysis of the twelve most frequent criteria applied for identifying the differences between inflectional and derivational rules. The analysis includes examples from three languages, English, Slovak and Hungarian.

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 2018

We use algorithmic learning and statistical methods over a form frequency list (compiled from the Hungarian web corpus) to investigate variation in Hungarian verbal inflection. Our aims are twofold: (i) to give an adequate description of this variation, which has not been described in detail in the literature and (ii) to explore the range and depth of lexical attractors that potentially shape this variation. These attractors range from closely related ones, such as the shape of the word form or the behaviour of the verb's paradigm, to broad ones, such as the behaviour of similar verbs or the phonotactics of related verb forms. We find that verbal variation is predominantly determined by similarity to related verb forms rather than by word shape or by word frequency. What is more, the effect of similarity is better approximated using inflected forms as opposed to base forms as points of comparison. This, in turn, supports a rich memory model of morphology and the mental lexicon 1 .

Phonology Yearbook, 1987

When a phonological rule applies across words, it is necessary to be able to specify across which types of words it may apply and across which it may not, or in other words, within which domain it applies. That such domains do not necessarily coincide with syntactic constituents has been amply demonstrated in such works as Clements (1978), Napoli & Nespor (1979), Rotenberg (1978), Selkirk (1978, 1984), Nespor & Vogel (1982, 1986) and Kaisse (1985). As has been argued in recent work, what is needed instead is a somewhat more complex theory in which there is a more complex type of interaction between phonological rules and syntactic structures. In the past few years, several such theories have been proposed, in particular, those advanced by Selkirk (1984), Kaisse (1985) and Nespor & Vogel (1986).

Hungarian provides good testing grounds to study some of the basic issues in lexical access and morphological decomposition in processing and representation. With its rich agglutinative structure accompanied with more and less productive allomorphy patterns it offers ample opportunities to raise and test quite straightforwardly some of the issues that are central in the contemporary literature on morphology processing. The

Journal of Child Language, 1976

This review analyses research on the acquisition of Hungarian morphology and syntax. The specific topics covered are morphological analysis, neologisms, acquisition of the first inflections, morpheme order, word order and agreement. Several lines of evidence suggest that the first unit acquired by the child is the word. Because of the structure of Hungarian, both errors in segmentation of the utterance and errors in the segmentation of the word are minimized. Morphological analysis seems to begin at the semantic level and proceed to the morphological level. Data on acquisition of free word order and early inflections are potentially of great interest, although presently inconclusive.

Sampsa Holopainen & Janne Saarikivi (eds.), Περὶ ὀρθότητος ἐτύμων – Uusiutuva uralilainen etymologia, 2018

This paper aims to establish three new sound laws regarding the development of specific consonant clusters in Hungarian: 1) Proto-Uralic *nč > Hungarian r; 2) Proto-Uralic *jŋ > Hungarian gy; 3) Proto-Uralic *ŋt > Hungarian ld. To validate these sound laws, new Uralic etymologies for the words köröm ‘nail’, far ‘buttocks, ass’, and vágy ‘desire, wish’ are proposed, and previous etymologies of agy ‘brain’, old ‘untie, unfasten’, and oldal ‘side’ are corroborated by new phonological arguments.

2004

It is fairly common for languages to have a tendency to adapt borrowed elements to their phonological system—this is what we call loanword adaptation. Segments that are not part of the phonemic inventory of a particular language are replaced with ‘similar’ sounds, the illformed consonant clusters are dissolved by epenthesis, hiatuses are filled, etc. There is, however, a phenomenon with the opposite effect: certain languages sometimes alter their adaptation processes, and accept loanword forms unchanged, thus violating their own phonological (phonotactic and/or morphophonological) constraints. What is more, these alterations are not at all random but more or less systematic, depending on the nature of the receiving language. The resulting forms are, of course, ‘marked’ in the language — some theories claim that they fall into a special stratum of the language’s lexicon (cf. among others, Itô & Mester  about Japanese). The objective of this paper is (i) to set up a coarse typolog...

2011

This paper deals with the morphophonology of Bosnian nominal declensions. It proposes a new insight into the behavior of the vocalic alternations occurring throughout the system. It is shown that the final vowel of each Bosnian noun results from the combination of three distinct phonological items, and that these items are the exponents of one and only one morphosyntactic property. These exponents are the basic elements of a Bosnian noun and are combined in one complex marker in the phonology. The analyses presented in this paper are consistent with the syntactic approach to word formation of Distributed Morphology (hereafter DM; Embick & Halle 2005, Halle & Marantz 1993). In DM, morphemes are feature-bundles associated to syntactic terminal nodes. In what follows, I propose an interpretation of the mechanism of spell-out, which is the device responsible for the association of phonological form to these feature-bundles. In representing underlying phonological forms, I make use of th...

Proceedings of 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06), 2006

This paper describes morphdb.hu, a Hungarian lexical database and morphological grammar. Morphdb.hu is the outcome of a several- year collaborative effort and represents the resource with the widest coverage and broadest range of applicability presently available for Hungarian. The grammar resource is the formalization of well-founded theoretical decisions handling inflection and productive derivation. The lexical database was created by merging three independent lexical databases, and the resulting resource was further extended

2018

Most cognitive linguists focus on lexical semantics in one or more languages from the aspect of culture. Yes, word derivation, especially the motivation of the lexemes shows much from the cognitive base of the linguistic image of the world. However, besides researching lexical semantics in different cultures, it is also possible to find the linguistic image of the world in morphology. In this paper we use the methods of cognitive linguistics and the method of comparing analysis of Slovak and Hungarian morphology – two genetically and typologically different languages in one area. The outputs of the paper show the cognitive relevancy of what is grammaticalised in the compared languages. The interpretation is based on the theory of linguistic relativity, analogy in bilingual language usage. The conclusion is that long time cultural convergence results in cognitive analogy even in typologically different languages. Bilateral and trilateral symmetry is also an important formal aspect of...

THE IMAGE OF THE WORLD IN SLOVAK AND HUNGARIAN GRAMMATICALISED CATEGORIES, 2018

Most cognitive linguists focus on lexical semantics in one or more languages from the aspect of culture. Yes, word derivation, especially the motivation of the lexemes shows much from the cognitive base of the linguistic image of the world. However, besides researching lexical semantics in different cultures, it is also possible to find the linguistic image of the world in morphology. In this paper we use the methods of cognitive linguistics and the method of comparing analysis of Slovak and Hungarian morphology – two genetically and typologically different languages in one area. The outputs of the paper show the cognitive relevancy of what is grammaticalised in the compared languages. The interpretation is based on the theory of linguistic relativity, analogy in bilingual language usage. The conclusion is that long time cultural convergence results in cognitive analogy even in typologically different languages. Bilateral and trilateral symmetry is also an important formal aspect of the stability of the grammaticalised categories: in a bipolar system (e.g. numerus) is the developing of different degrees more possible as in a stabile “triangle-like” grammaticalised category (e.g. Slavic and Finno-Ugric tense). The grammaticalised cognitive domains can be bilateral and trilateral, the study shows which of them differ and which converge in Slovak and Hungarian. Keywords: linguistic image of the world, morphology, Slovak language, Hungarian language, contrastive grammar, grammaticalised categories

I want to thank Sally Thomason for many discussions of language contact issues and also for her meticulous comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I also want to thank Miklós Kontra for numerous discussions about American-Hungarian language use, Christina Paulston for guiding me with sociolinguistic issues, and Don Peckham for his comments on an earlier version of this paper.

1984

In this paper it is shown that the behavior of neutral vowels in Hungarian, i.e. vowels that do not undergo vowel harmony, can he readily accounted for in an autosegmental analysis of vowel harmony. This analysis also allows for an insightful account of lexical exceptions to Hungarian vowel harmony (a much debated issue) without making use of absolute neutralization and ad hoc word-internal grammatical boundaries.