Péter Rebrus

Morphophonology and the hierarchical lexicon

That morphology has to have an interface with both syntax and phonologyis a commonplace in linguistics. Separating phonological and morphologicalinformation results in redundant duplication of information and is bound toresort to unmotivated diacritic annotation of properties relevant at the interfaceswith other levels. This supplies motivation for such approach to grammar inwhich the representational levels of linguistic knowledge are integrated.Such anintegrated model of language questions the autonomy of linguistic modulesand attempts to represent theintricate correlations between the various levelsof linguistic representation directly by assuming a homogeneous architecture.These tenets are embraced by most monostratal theories of grammar. In thisspirit we provide a novel account of anumber of phenomena of Hungarian morphophonologyusing the concept of hierarchical lexicon.

Monotonicity and the typology of front/back harmony

Abstract In this paper, we analyse the surface patterns of suffix harmony in front/back harmony systems as the harmonic values front and back being assigned to harmonic contexts consisting of strings of syllables combining front, back and neutral nuclei. We claim that the harmonic contexts can be arranged in a fixed (universal) scale, the frontness/backness scale, with reference to which the possible (i.e. attested) front/back harmony systems can be characterised in a simple way: only those systems are possible where the assignment of values to the harmonic contexts is monotonic, which makes sure that only contiguous (non-interrupted) sequences of harmonic values are assigned to the harmonic contexts. We give formal definitions of monotonicity in terms of ordering and similarity and discuss predictions about possible harmony systems that follow from monotonicity (which we claim are borne out). These predictions are typological: harmony systems can show disharmonic behaviour, but in a principled way: only those systems exist (at least in front/back harmony) that exhibit a monotonic pattern. In the second half of the paper, we discuss variation in harmony and analyse in detail variation in anti-harmony and transparency in Hungarian, which is thus an example of a variable harmony pattern. We argue that variable front/back harmony patterns assign a “variable” value to some harmonic contexts in addition to the front and back values and can be shown to be constrained by monotonicity, whose definition is naturally extendable to patterns with variation. We discuss both the ordering-based and the similarity-based definitions and the predictions about possible variable harmony systems that follow from the definitions. One of the main predictions of the paper is a consequence of monotonicity: the locus of the variation in a pattern occurs only “in between” non-variable subpatterns. We explore a possible way of quantification in which we identify the harmonic values with the relative token frequency of the forms where the number associated with a variable value is p such that 0<p<1. We show that monotonicity can be defined for quantified patterns too both under the ordering interpretation and the similarity-based one. We conclude by discussing the predictions of the quantified model and showing (based on a corpus study we carried out to discover the ‘frontness ratio’ of variable sites of suffix harmony) that the quantified variable front/back harmony pattern of Hungarian is monotonic and conforms to these predictions.

The monotonic behaviour of language patterns

Our main goal in the target article (Rebrus et al. 2015b) is to account for the occurring variable and invariable patterns of front/back suffix harmony (the assignment of harmonic values in suffixes to harmonic stem contexts) using very general constructs and principles which only make reference to surface representations and not to abstract (underlying) ones. The constructs and principles we have utilised are (a) the frontness/backness scale, which is a universally fixed arrangement of harmonic environments which are arranged according to their similarity to one another and (b) monotonicity, which requires that in a well-formed system the assignment of harmonic values to the harmonic environments should be monotonic assuming (a) above. We have given the central concept of monotonicity precise and explicit interpretations in terms of ordering and in terms of similarity. This approach aims to define the range of possible surface forms in harmony systems declaratively, i.e. as a description of surface patterns directly without reference to any kind of input-output mapping machinery. Cross-linguistically, this yields a typology (predicts what systems are possible) and language-specifically it gives an analysis of specific systems by identifying the types they belong to. Monotonicity is a general principle which applies in various, sometimes otherwise very different patterns in language including front/back harmony in suffixes. Furthermore, in principle, monotonicity can be defined in various ways and a different (looser or stricter) interpretation may be suitable to capture the patterning of different kinds of linguistic phenomena. We have distinguished three models of monotonicity differing in their degree of strictness. (i) The “loose” model is based on the concept of similarity between the contexts induced by the context scale. This is equivalent to the requirement that the contexts to which identical values are assigned must be contiguous – it