Phonological section

THE AIM OF OUR INQUIRY is to establish the distribution of certain optional phonological and/or phonetic rules in terms of

1) social position

2) speech tempo

3) style.

In other words: what differences can be observed between varieties dependent on speech tempo (cf. Elekfi 1973, Kerek 1977 and Dressler-Wodak 1982) and the varieties governed by the amount of audio-monitoring (cf. Labov 1966, 1972 and 1984)? Also, we are interested to find out the degree of homogeneity/heterogeneity of varieties along the slow-fast and casual-formal dimensions within a given socio-economic group. It is also unknown how speakers located at the same spot on the speed or style axes but of different social background differ in their speech performance i.e. what difference there is between the fast speech of uneducated speakers vs. college graduates or between the formal style of university graduates and those with only elementary school education.

Research tools

The varieties governed by speech tempo can be examined by asking informants to read out the same passage first slowly then at a fast rate.

The various speech styles ranging from formal to casual speech will be recorded in the way pioneered by Labov:

1.

Minimal pairs will be read out (e.g. sor - sör `row' - `beer'),

2.

word-lists will be read aloud,

3.

short passages will be read out,

4.

words will be elicited from informants in the course of conversation (in the same way that field workers on Language Atlas projects did),

5.

all relevant data in the informant's speech from the more informal parts of the interview will be considered.

Research topics in phonology

The orthographic and phonetic symbols of Hungarian are reproduced in Table 2.1 and Table 2.2 from Vago (1980).

=wsuipa12

=wsuipa12

=wsuipa10

 

 

Orthographic Phonetic Description

a a short low, slightly rounded back vowel ([�])

á a: long low unrounded back vowel

b b voiced bilabial stop

c ts voiceless dental affricate

cs c voiceless alveo-palatal affricate

d d voiced dental stop

dz dz voiced dental affricate

dzs j voiced alveo-palatal affricate

e e short low unrounded front vowel (=[])

é e: long mid unrounded front vowel

f f voiceless labio-dental fricative

g g voiced velar stop

gy dy voiced palatal stop

h h glottal glide

i i short high unrounded front vowel

í i: long high unrounded front vowel

j j palatal glide

k k voiceless velar stop

l l dental lateral

ly j palatal glide

m m bilabial nasal

n n dental nasal

ny ny palatal nasal

o o short mid rounded back vowel

ó o: long mid rounded back vowel

ö ö short mid rounded front vowel

o ö: long mid rounded front vowel

p p voiceless bilabial stop

r r dental trill

s s voiceless alveo-palatal fricative

sz s voiceless dental fricative

t t voiceless dental stop

ty ty voiceless palatal stop

u u short high rounded back vowel

ú u: long high rounded back vowel

ü ü short high rounded front vowel

u ü: long high rounded front vowel

v v voiced labio-dental fricative

z z voiced dental fricative

zs z voiced alveo-palatal fricative

 

 

Front Back

Unrounded Rounded Rounded

High i ü u

Mid ö o

Low e a

   

Front Back

Unrounded Rounded Unrounded Rounded

High í u ú

Mid é o ó

Low á

1.

  Affrication. If a dental or palatal stop is followed by a strident fricative, then geminate affricates result. The assimilating affrication between t  + sz   $\rightarrow$  cc (e.g. látszik ) in suffixed forms often does not take place, with ad+sz yielding atsz instead of the expected acc (Deme 1962:102). Some authors, Szántó (1962:164) for example, think that this affrication does not take place across word boundaries. Elekfi (1973:20) holds that ``in compound words ts and tsz become cs and c respectively only in fast, hasty speech but this assimilation does not work across word boundaries.'' Vago (1980:37) claims ``there is no affrication in két szék `two chairs'.'' Possible cases of affrication will be examined in three positions: word-internally (e.g. hatszoros ), across word boundary (e.g. hat szoros ), and with contrastive stress. Two types of contrastive stress will be analyzed:

a) ez nem hat völgy hanem hat szoros `these are not six valleys but six canyons', and b) nem öt szoros csavar, hanem hat szoros csavar . `not five tight screws but six tight screws'

On the role of contrastive stress in voice assimilation cf. Deme 1962:100.

2.

  The strident consonants sz, z , s , zs , c , dz , cs , and dzs show place assimilation with another strident consonant following them (cf. Vago 1980:38). Accordingly, kis szoba 'small room' $\rightarrow$ KISZ szoba , rácsszeru 'grid-like' $\rightarrow$ rácszeru etc. According to Elekfi (1973:15) place assimilation is a regional feature, in careful common style the constituent segments are pronounced one by one as written e.g. malacság [c-s]. The assimilated variety ``is less careful, rather belongs to casual, everyday speech''. We hypothesize that this rule operates as a function of speech tempo and style, in other words assimilation in a minimal pair like kis szoba 'small room' vs. KISZ szoba 'Communist Youth League office' will not take place in the most formal setting (reading of minimal pairs) but will do so in casual speech.

3.

  Palatal assimilation. We will examine to what extent the assimilation exemplified by látja `he sees it' $\rightarrow$ láttya depends on speech tempo and speech style. (When the glide j follows t , d , n , or ty , gy , ny , in Hungarian, the result is a geminate palatal consonant - cf. Vago 1980:39.)

4.

  How do speakers' efforts to distinguish meaning manifest themselves? When is a pair like bontsd fel homophonous with bonts fel (as against the pair rántsd le - ránts le , cf. Kerek 1977:118)? When is the word lombtalanít `defoliate' distinguished from lomtalanít `clear sg. of junk'? Elekfi (1973:62) holds that ``when in danger of ambiguity ... we tend to pronounce the medial stop as well, because for example bontsd fel [boncstfel] is different from bonts fel [boncsfel] ''

1) bontsd fel  `open it up' $\rightarrow$ boncfel

 
		2) bonts fel  `open up sg.' $\rightarrow$ boncfel

BUT:

 
		3) rántsd le  `pull it down' $\rightarrow$ ra:njle

 
		4) ránts le  `pull down sg.' $\rightarrow$ ra:ncle

The dental stop is dropped in (1), resulting in homophony with (2). l does not induce voice assimilation in Hungarian. In (3) d causes the preceding affricate to become voiced before being dropped, whereas in (4) d is absent thus no voice assimilation takes place and hence (3) and (4) are different.

5.

  The elision of l . According to Deme (1962:105) this is a ``strongly dialect'' feature: e.g. tanútam instead of the common style rendering tanultam which is identical with the typographic image of the word. Elekfi (1973:5) regards this feature characteristic of ``almost every dialect and the whole of less careful common style as well.''

6.

  The elision of t as in jelentkezik $\rightarrow$ jelenkezik. According to Elekfi (1973:60) the t -less variant ``cannot be accepted in common style''. Also to be examined is the pair bólintgat vs.bólingat , which is listed in the orthographical dictionary in its t- less form but according to G. Varga (1968:151) the t -less variety is more frequent in the speech of less educated speakers whereas university graduates tend to prefer forms with the t . (bólint means `to nod', bólintgat `to keep nodding'. The form with t is more transparent because -int is an instantaneous verbal suffix.)

7.

  About two-thirds of Hungarian speakers have two e phonemes: a front low e (traditionally called open e ) and a front mid e (traditionally called close e ; henceforth written as ë ). About one-third of Hungarians, including the standard Budapest Hungarian speakers, only have one (open) e . -- Budapest is a melting pot with lots of in-migrants. In-migrating two-e speakers must be diagnosed in order for us to say something about the process of two-e speakers becoming one-e speakers in Budapest. According to G. Varga (1968:32), a traditional dialect study of 200 Budapest speakers, ``the standard Budapest Hungarian open e sounds predominate in place of etymologically close e , with the close e being present in negligible number as a non-phonemic variant; not a single informant used it correctly and consistently.'' The question is what is the social distribution of close ë in Budapest. Györgyi G. Varga had access to ``relatively limited data of continuous speech'' (op.cit. 29). In the tests we are going to focus on a few words only in this regard, but this will be complemented by a massive amount of continuous speech.

8.

  How does typewritten text influence the speakers' reading performance? (N.B. Until about the early 1980s the keyboards of Hungarian typewriters lacked three keys: í, ú, u. Instead of these high long vowels only their short high equivalents (i, u, ü) could be typed. It has been claimed several times that this deficiency of the keyboard has an influence on people's speech i.e. makes them use short vowels instead of standard long vowels, thus accelerating the change (?) or tendency to shorten these vowels. Szántó (1962:454) explains assimilation that takes place in spontaneous speech but not in reading aloud by the ``spell'' of the written text. We will examine whether informants will read out words differently if they are spelt on typewriters with the old and the new Hungarian standard keyboard (e.g. hosszu - hosszú 'long') or if they are spelt according to the 10th or the 11th edition of the Orthographical Rules of the Hungarian Academy (e.g. zsüri - zsuri ). A further question is how the evidence obtained relates to data from spontaneous speech. For a VARBRUL analysis of this problem see Pintzuk et al 1995.

9.

  Morphology: -ba vs. -ban . -Ba/-be vs. -ban/-ben constitute an important grammatical difference in written Hungarian e.g. ház-ban `in the house' vs. ház-ba `into the house'. This distinction is often not observed in speech, -ba being used instead of -ban . To what extent is the realization of -ba(n) influenced by the ``erosion and subsequent elimination of the sense of direction'' (G. Varga 1987)? Can we corroborate the four types posited by G. Varga, namely, 1) concrete location, neutral context (e.g. ülök a szobában `I'm sitting in the room'), 2) concrete location, non-neutral context (e.g. benn ülök a szobában `I'm sitting inside the room'; the adverb benn `inside' is related to the suffix -ban/-ben `in'), 3) more abstract adverbial function (e.g. gyermekkorában, nyomorban, kettesben `in his childhood, in poverty, in pairs'), and 4) governed complements (e.g. gyönyörködik , bízik , csalódik valamiben `to take delight in, to have trust in, to be disappointed in'). What is the distribution of -ba forms in -ban function in terms of speech tempo, speech style and the socio-economic status of speakers?

10.

  Morphonology: Context effects in vowel harmony. Certain Hungarian (loan) words (e.g. farmer `jeans' and férfi `man' have vacillating suffixes, e.g. farmer-ben or farmer-ban `in jeans'. Kontra and Ringen (1986) claim that such vacillation is not free but influenced by context in such a way that 1) if the word immediately before the test word with the vacillating suffix has a suffix morpheme identical with the vacillating suffix morpheme, then the vowel quality (front or back) of the preceding suffix may influence the choice of suffix vowel in the test word. For instance, subjects are more likely to use the front suffix ben in a sentence like

Eb-ben a farmer- ... nem mehetsz színházba .

`this-in the jeans- not you-may-go to-theatre

than in

Ab-ban a farmer- ...  nem mehetsz színházba .
`that-in the jeans- not you-may-go to-theatre

Written elicitation tests have shown this effect of context in vowel harmony (Kontra et al. 1990). The Survey will gather additional spoken data to further test the hypothesis.

11.

  What is the social distribution of certain stigmatized pronunciation variants e.g. inekció , szofiáné ? What pronunciation variants do old loans like nylon - nejlon and some recent ones e.g. spray - szpré , dzsúz - dzsúsz have?

12.

  What is the pronunciation of words which show variation in vowel length in speech but are consistently spelt with a long vowel such as színház, útiköltség, háború , fésu and huvös (cf. G. Varga 1968) as well as bölcsode (cf. SPG I.:421)?

References

Deme, László. 1962. Hangtan (=Phonetics and phonology). In: Tompa, József (ed.) A mai magyar nyelv rendszere, (The system of present-day Hungarian, I:57-119.) Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.

Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Ruth Wodak. 1982. Sociophonological methods in the study of sociolinguistic variation in Viennese German. Language in Society 11:339-70.

Elekfi, László. 1973. A magyar hangkapcsolódások fonetikai és fonológiai szabályai.
Manuscript. Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Kerek, Andrew. 1977. Consonant elision in Hungarian casual speech. Studies in Finno-Ugric Linguistics in Honor of Alo Raun, ed. by Denis Sinor. IUUAS Volume 131:115-130. Bloomington.

Kontra, Miklós & Catherine Ringen. 1986. Hungarian Vowel Harmony: The Evidence from Loanwords. Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher 58:1-14.

Kontra, Miklós; Catherine O. Ringen; Joseph P. Stemberger, 1990. The Effect of Context on Suffix Vowel Choice in Hungarian Vowel Harmony. In: Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Congress of Linguists, Berlin, August 10 - August 15, 1987. pp. 450-453. Akademie-Verlag Berlin.

Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.

-- 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

-- 1984. Field Methods of the Project on Linguistic Change and Variation. In Baugh, John and Joel Sherzer (eds.) Language in Use: Readings in Sociolinguistics, 28-53.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Pintzuk, Susan; Miklós Kontra; Klára Sándor; Anna Borbély, 1995. The effect of the typewriter on Hungarian reading style. (Working Papers in Hungarian Sociolinguistics No 1, September 1995). Budapest: Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. 30 pp.

Szántó, Éva. 1962. A magyar mássalhangzó-hasonulás vizsgálata fonológiai aspektusban. Magyar Nyelv 58:159-166 & 449-458.

Vago, Robert M. 1980. The Sound Pattern of Hungarian. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.

G. Varga, Györgyi. 1968. Alakváltozatok a budapesti köznyelvben. (Form variants in the everyday language of Budapest). Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.

G. Varga, Györgyi. 1987. Vélemény ``A budapesti szociolingvisztikai interjú'' címu
tervezetrol. (On the Project Outline of ``The Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview'').
Manuscript.