Speaker: Dóra Takács (MIT)
Title: Vowel-zero alternations in Hungarian
Time: Monday, April 8th, 5pm – 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: There are a closed class of about 500 stems in Hungarian that are subject to vowel-zero alternations if they are followed by a potentially vowel-initial suffix (Siptár & Törkenczy 2000).
Early proposals (Vago 1980, Törkenczy 1992, Siptár & Törkenczy 2000, Abrusan 2005) mostly focused on whether this process is a result of epenthesis, metathesis or syncope . Some patterns among the consonants in these exceptional stems have been previously noted in the literature, but these observations were not integrated in the previous analyses. In this talk I show how stem-internal vowel-zero alternation in Hungarian interacts with voicing assimilation, affrication and gemination and use these interactions to support the claim that this process is in fact a result of syncope.