22 Oct 2002

Viktor Tron

Past tense suffixation in Hungarian has been long recognized as a rather intricate subsystem which proved a challenge to linguistic analysis (Rebrus 2000, Siptar and Torkenczy 2000). Through presenting a novel approach to describe Hungarian past tense suffixation, the talk aims to strengthen the case for a functionalist approach to systematicity in language.

If we abstract away from vowel harmony the suffix used for marking the past tense in Hungarian shows a three-way allomorphy (i.e., ~t/~tt/~Vtt when V stands for a mid vowel). The facts that these surface variants share the alveolar stop /t/ and that the alternants can be related by otherwise motivated processes such as gemination and vowel epenthesis encouraged many to assume a common (underlying) representation for the variants. Since it is beyond doubt that phonotactic constraints are at play in conditioning the allomorphy, it is reasonable to propose an analysis based on phonotactic (syllable structure) constraints. Such an account, however, turns out to be extremely hard to tune in when it comes to details. In particular, cases abound where the local phonological environment of the verb stem is of no help in predicting the attested past tense forms. These cases are usually relegated to the realm of exceptions and idiosyncrasies and are denied the possibility of being systematic in some other way.

In addition to an account of the productive rule-like patterns of the allomorphy, the analysis proposed here is trying to capture the additional systematicity in irregular items as well as to explain the motivation behind idiosyncrasies and hesitations. This is made possible by a holistic view on the problems of morphophonology, which conceives of grammar as an emergent network of richly represented individual lexical items (Bybee 2001). Instead of abstract rules and representations, relations between surface forms such as uniformity and contrast (Kenstowicz 2000) are rendered the driving force in the explanations. In particular the relations between past and present tense forms of verbs appear to have a crucial role. The analysis we present can be cast in an Optimality Theoretical framework.

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