Lexical patterns in Hungarian vowel harmony

Rácz, Péter and Rebrus, Péter (2025) Lexical patterns in Hungarian vowel harmony. CORPUS LINGUISTICS AND LINGUISTIC THEORY, 22 (1). pp. 93-113. ISSN 1613-7027

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Abstract

Hungarian shows variable front vowel harmony, particularly in suffixed back vowel + [epsilon] nouns. The study aims to address two main research questions: (1) To what extent does stem-level information (similarity across stems) predict suffix variation for back vowel + [epsilon] stems in Hungarian corpus data? (2) Do suffixes themselves predict suffix variation beyond the stem-level information? We draw on a dataset of 200 noun stems, 4,501 suffixed forms and 4 x 106 tokens, based on the New Hungarian Webcorpus, and use a K-Nearest Neighbours learner and a hierarchical generalised linear model to address these questions. We find that the majority of back vowel + [epsilon] stems show variable vowel harmony, that this depends on stem similarity and that similarity effects are amplified by vowel-initial suffixes. This points to a model of Hungarian vowel harmony in which stem- and suffix-level information are lexically specified.

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