H instead of L in Hungarian |
|
Sylvia Blaho (ELTE Budapest) |
Hungarian has a
phonetically voiced and a ‘plain’ voiceless series of obstruents. The two sets
behave in a perfectly symmetrical fashion in voicing assimilation: in an
obstruent cluster, all members assimilate to the rightmost obstruent regardless
of whether it is voiced or not. Furthermore, there is no positional
(syllable-final or word-final) neutralisation of voicing in the language. It
has therefore been assumed (for instance by Szigetvári 1998a,b) that the
voicing contrast in Hungarian is marked by the element L: voiced
obstruents contain this element while voiceless ones do not.
The behaviour of
the sounds /j/ and /h/ deviates from the pattern described above. /j/ is
realised as a palatal approximant except when preceded by a consonant and
followed by a pause, in which case it surfaces as a palatal fricative. When the
consonant preceding the palatal fricative is an obstruent, /j/ undergoes
progressive assimilation: it is voiced after voiced obstruents (dobj
‘throw Imp.’) and voiceless after voiceless ones (kapj ‘get Imp.’). When
preceded by a sonorant, the palatal fricative is voiced (férj
‘husband’).
/h/ is realised as
a velar fricative in codas, and it remains voiceless even if followed by a
voiced obstruent, creating otherwise unattested clusters of obstruents not
agreeing in voicing (fa[xb]a ‘into the pigeon hole’). Additionally,
the glottal allophone of /h/ causes the devoicing of preceding obstruents in
some dialects (a[d] ‘give’ – a[th]at ‘can give’) but not
in others (a[dh]at ‘can give’).
I present a unified
analysis of the apparently irregular cases of voicing assimilation described
above. My solution crucially relies on the following assumptions:
1.
Laryngeal
elements are linked to the element h in obstruents, not directly to the
skeletal slot (Szigetvári 1998b).
2.
Voicing
assimilation involves the spreading of h (and its dependants), not the
spreading of laryngeal elements.
3.
The
voicing contrast in Hungarian is marked by the element H, not L.
Thus, voiceless obstruents contain an extra H compared to their voiced counterparts.
I show that GP
lacks the necessary theoretical apparatus to account for the data. I propose an
analysis in a combined model of GP and OT, following the work of Polgárdi
(1998), Rowicka (1999) and others.
My talk also
addresses the question of the phonetic interpretation of elements. While lip
service is paid to the idea of substance-free phonology in GP, most analyses
assume a one-to-one mapping between phonetic and phonological objects. I argue
that the interpretation of phonological primes should be based on their place
within the system and their phonological behaviour rather then their phonetic
characteristics.
References
Polgárdi, Krisztina
1998. Vowel Harmony. An account in terms of government and optimality. Ph.D. dissertation,
Universiteit Leiden. Holland Academic Graphics, The Hague.
Rowicka, Gra¿yna 1999. On Ghost Vowels. Ph.D. dissertation,
Universiteit Leiden. Holland Academic Graphics, The Hague.
Szigetvári, Péter
1998a. ‘Voice assimilation in Hungarian: the hitches’. The Even Yearbook.
ELTE SEAS Working Papers in Linguistics 4. 223-236.
Szigetvári, Péter
1998b. ‘Why [h] is not voiced’. In Eugeniusz Cyran (ed.) Structure and
interpretation. Studies in Phonology. PASE Studies & Monographs 4. Lublin: Wydawnictwo Folium. 287-301.