Uniformity and Contrast in the Hungarian Verbal Paradigm

Abstract

This chapter analyzes lexical allomorphy in the Hungarian verbal paradigm, specifically the variety that is paradigmatically motivated. The traditional strategy to account for allomorphy with reference to a common underlying form cannot succeed in the case of lexical allomorphy because in lexical allomorphy the allomorphs do not have phonological properties that permit the postulation of a single underlying source. Therefore lexical allomorphy is inaccessible to derivational analysis or an analysis based on the comparison of underlying and surface forms. By contrast, the current analysis relies on Output–Output constraints. It shows that lexical allomorphy is due to an interaction of paradigmatic uniformity and contrast constraints which are relativized to morphosyntactic dimensions. Hungarian verbal inflectional morphology is basically agglutinative, but crucially the correspondence between morphosyntactic values and distinct suffixes is not always one-to-one: in some forms more than one morphosyntactic category can be expressed by one suffix. The chapter develops an alternative interpretation of PAR constraints to handle this situation. This interpretation explains an interesting phenomenon (of which the Hungarian paradigm is an example), namely the case when lexical allomorphy is conservative, i.e., when the lexical allomorph must be one which is attested at some other point(s) in the paradigm.

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