On Hungarian Morphology

ON HUNGARIAN MORPHOLOGY ´ KORNAI A NDR AS Abstract The aim of this study is to provide an autosegmental description of Hungarian morphology. Chapter 1 sketches the (meta)theoretical background and summarizes the main argument. In Chapter 2 phonological prerequisites to morphological analysis are discussed. Special attention is paid to Hungarian vowel harmony. In Chapter 3 a universal theory of lexical categories is proposed, and the category system of Hungarian is described within it. The final chapter presents a detailed description of nominal and verbal inflection in Hungarian, and describes the main features of a computer implementation based on the analyses provided here. 1 0. Preface 3 1. Introduction 1.1 The methods of the investigation 1.2 Summary of new results 1.3 Vowel harmony 1.4 Summary of conclusions 5 6 8 9 12 2. Phonology 2.1 The feature system: vowels 2.2 Consonants 2.3 Vowel harmony 2.4 Syllable structure 2.5 Postlexical rules 2.6 Appendix 14 14 23 29 47 53 57 3. Words and paradigms 3.1 Some definitions 3.2 The lexical categories of Hungarian 67 67 76 4. Inflectional morphology 4.1 Conjugation 4.2 Declension 4.3 Implementation 4.4 Conclusion 81 81 106 116 147 5. Bibliography 149 2 0 Preface This thesis was written in 1984-1986 – the first publicly circulated version (Version 1.4) was defended at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) Institute of Linguistics in September 1986. An extended Version 2 was submitted to the HAS Scientific Qualifications Committee in August 1988, and was formally defended in September 1989. Version 2.1, the 1994 paperback edition in Linguistica: Studia et Dissertationes (ISBN 963 8461 73 X) was different from Version 2 in two main respects: an English ´ es T´ezisei replaced the old Introduction, and the version of the official Summary Kandid´atusi Ertekez´ section on implementation reflected the system that was running at Xerox PARC at the time of the formal defense. The current Version 3.0 (pdf only) is based on the source of the paper version with minimal reformatting (the addition of hyperrefs, and a slight revision of this preface – salient changes italicized). To leave the material in the 1986 thesis in manuscript format until 1994 would have required more patience than the author can lay claim to. The abstract analysis of feature systems in chapter 2.1 forms the basis of the more detailed analysis in Kornai 1993. The analyses of Hungarian vowel harmony in 2.1 and 2.6 have been published in Kornai 1987 and Kornai 1991. Part of the material on syllable structure in 2.4 can now be found in Kornai 1990, and a more extended version of the material in 2.5 on postlexical phonology is in Kornai and K´alm´an 1989. The analysis of lexical categories in 3.1 and 3.2 has been published as Kornai 1985. Except for chapter 4, which describes the morphological rules in detail and discusses a two-level implementation, almost all the material has been published elsewhere by 1994. What was the purpose of the paper edition in 1994 and what is the purpose of the present (2007) pdf version? In 1994 it was hoped that by bringing the parts together in a convenient monographic format the reader could use the volume as a reference work detailing nearly all aspects of the inflectional and many aspects of the derivational morphology of Hungarian. In this regard, the book has been clearly superseded by Sipt´ar and T¨orkenczy 2000. There are a number of places where references to this volume and to later developments could be incorporated, especially in the treatment of underspecification (see Steriade 1995), multiple specification (see Lieber 1987) and feature geometry (see Clements and Hume 1995). In general, I restricted myself to updating the references by citin