Miklós Kontra

Hungarian neutral vowels

Abstract This paper reports on recent empirical investigations of Hungarian which call into question several widely accepted claims about neutral vowels in Hungarian. Subjects treated e more like a front harmonic vowel than a neutral vowel, they were more likely to use back vowel suffixes with mixed vowel roots with e and e in the last syllable if the roots were disyllabic than if they were longer, and most subjects responded with front harmonic suffix vowels for most roots with neutral vowels in the final two syllables.

Hungarian Verbal Puzzles and the Intensity of Language Contact.

Grammaticality judgments of bilingual Hungarians in Slovakia and Ukraine vs. Yugoslavia show that overt objects are much more acceptable in the northern Slavic countries than in Yugoslavia. Two conflicting hypotheses have been advanced to explain this difference. The structural hypothesis claims that Serbian cliticization is responsible, while the socio-historical hypothesis claims that the difference in grammaticality judgments is due to a difference in the duration of Hungarian–Slavic language contact north of and south of present-day Hungary. Data from a seven-country survey (N = 846) show that there is a split between judgments in the northern vs. southern Slavic countries across a wide range of linguistic variables, which discredits the structural explanation for the object pro-drop variable, at least as the sole cause of change. Moreover, statistical analyses of 24 variables provide substantial empirical verification of Thomason and Kaufmans ‘two crucial parameters of intensity of contact in a borrowing situation’: time and level of bilingualism. It is shown that the 250 years of contact between Hungarian and Serbian has resulted in much smaller contact effects than the thousand-year-old contact of Hungarian with the northern Slavic languages. Bilingual Hungarians who constitute a local minority in the settlements where they live systematically favor the contact-induced variants of variables vis-a`-vis those who constitute a local majority.