Neutrality and variation: what are they?

Siptár, Péter (2015) Neutrality and variation: what are they? Theoretical Linguistics, 41 (1-2). pp. 97-103. ISSN 0301-4428, ESSN: 1613-4060

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Abstract

In this brief contribution, I will raise two basic issues – where basic is meant both as ‘elementary’ and as ‘fundamental’) that are at the heart of Rebrus and Törkenczy (2015). Both of these issues involve notions that are somehow taken for granted by the authors and are not given much consideration. Very simply put, they can be summarised as follows: -- What makes an N an N, and how can you recognise one when you see it? -- Are ‘lexical variation’ and ‘vacillation’ the same thing or are they different? With respect to the first problem, that of neutral vowels, the authors note in passing that the distinction between harmonic and neutral vowels is (normally) gradual, rather than categorical; but then they assume a “once an N, always an N” stance (recall the old structuralist dictum “once a phoneme, always a phoneme”) and capitalise on the intuitive notion of ‘neutral vowel’ which we all seem to share without looking more closely. In doing so, they abstract away from as much detail as possible. In particular, with respect to Hungarian, they deliberately ignore the Height Effect (Hayes and Cziráky Londe 2006) and Harmonic Uniformity (Rebrus and Törkenczy 2015); and, in general terms, they disregard the potentially non-uniform occurrence of individual neutral vowels in invariable suffixes or in anti-harmonic stems (in systems with more than one neutral vowel), as well as any other aspect that might make the system non-categorical, controversial, or messy (except for variation, broadly construed, that has a distinguished and eminent role in the analysis they present). With respect to the second problem, the authors simply subsume both phenomena concerned – quite distinct as they appear to be at first sight – under a common label, and do not discuss whether or not they are right in doing so in any detail (except for a brief mention, in footnote 39, of Hayes et al. (2009) who also refer to them by an umbrella term, ‘zones of variation’). This is all the more important since their key explanatory device, monotonicity, actually hinges on whether or not ‘variation’ in R&T’s sense is a single coherent concept.

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