How morphological is Hungarian vowel harmony?

There is a significant degree of phonological indeterminacy in front/back harmony in Hungarian (HVH), which manifests itself in lexical variation and/or vacillation. Harmonic behaviour in the zone of variation strongly supports the hypothesis that harmonic classes which individual roots belong to are organized as a paradigmatic system, very similar to inflectional classes. Such lexically determined declension classes are required independently of vowel harmony to account for various other lexically conditioned alternations in Hungarian, e.g., the alternations involving linking vowels in suffixes and yod in 3rd person possessives. A further evidence for the morphologisation of HVH is a paradigm uniformity effect, Harmonic Uniformity, which reduces harmonic uncertainty by making a stem’s harmonic behaviour predictable from that of its root. Thus, HVH is determined by morphology (paradigmatic classes and paradigm uniformity) in addition to (and sometimes overriding) phonology

Variation, the Height Effect, and Disharmony in Hungarian Front/Back Harmony

The neutral vowels in Hungarian front/back harmony a gradience in neutrality (from most neutral to least neutral) known as the Height Effect. In this paper we examine the relationship between two aspects of the Height Effect: disharmony associated with invariance in suffixes and the gradience in transparency in roots (the only aspect of the Height Effect that is usually analysed in the literature). We will show that there is a parallelism between the differences in the distribution of the various neutral vowels in invariant suffixes and the Height Effect as manifested in the gradience of transparency in roots and will argue that the latter is in fact motivated by the former due to an independently motivated general constraint, Harmonic Consistency, which regulates the harmonic behaviour suffixes in morphologically complex contexts

In a tight spot: An analogy-bound gap in the Hungarian verbal paradigm

In this paper we describe a phonotactically unmotivated gap in the paradigm of Cs-final verb stems in Hungarian. We show that the forms in the cells where the missing forms would occur must be licensed by other forms in some designated cells of the verbal paradigm. These latter forms, however, are missing in the case of Cs-stems (for independent reasons) and thus the gap is the result of the absence of this paradigmatic licensing (crucially, the missing forms are phonotactically well-formed). Thus, the gap is 'analogically-bound'