"Case suffixes", postpositions, and the phonological word in Hungarian

Linguistics: an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences, March-April, 2008 by Jochen Trommer

Abstract

In this article I propose a new construction algorithm for the phonological word in Hungarian. Based on a detailed discussion of the differences between so-called 'postpositions" and 'case suffixes', I show that both types of adpositional elements are of the same morphosyntactic category, and that phonological word status depends not on an arbitrary division between affixes and syntactically free items, but on phonological properties of the respective adpositions." Bisyllabic adpositions form phonological words on their own, while monosyllabic adpositions are integrated into the phonological word of their lexical head. Generalizing this result, I argue that all functional elements of Hungarian traditionally called 'inflectional affixes' are syntactically independent functional heads integrated into the phonological word of a preceding lexical head because they are prosodically too small. I show that apparently bisyllabic inflectional affixes must either be decomposed into different markers or are underlyingly monosyllabic, and develop a ranking of optimality-theoretic alignment constraints implementing the construction algorithm for the phonological word in formal detail.

1. Introduction

Descriptive tradition and orthographic convention suggest that Hungarian has two different types of functional items corresponding to adpositions: case suffixes and postpositions. The main empirical evidence for this distinction (Kiss 2002: 185) is that case suffixes (1a)-(1b) undergo vowel harmony with the preceding head noun while postpositions (1c)(1d) do not: (1)

(1) Case suffixes and postpositions

a. a haz-ban

the house-in

'in the house'

b. a kert-ben

the garden-in

'in the garden'

c. a haz alatt

the house under

'under the house'

d. a kert alatt

the garden under

'under the garden'

In this article, I argue that case markers are part of the same phonological word (henceforth PWord) as their head nouns, but syntactically independent units, in other words they are postpositions. This claim is consistent with the independently motivated observation made in Nespor and Vogel (1986) that Hungarian vowel harmony is not operative on the morphosyntactic word, but on the PWord. However, it requires reconsideration of their definition of the PWord as a stem plus all following suffixes. I show that the crucial difference between "case suffixes" and other postpositions is phonological--"case suffixes" are monosyllabic while other postpositions are bisyllabic--and propose an optimality-theoretic analysis of PWords in Hungarian which predicts the observed differences.

The rest of the article is organized as follows: In Section 2, I introduce the analysis of the PWord in Hungarian proposed by Nespor and Vogel (1986). In Section 3, I discuss common properties of and differences between case suffixes and postpositions, and conclude that the differences are purely phonological. Based on this observation, I propose a new definition of the PWord in Hungarian in Section 4, which is formally implemented by the ranking of OT-constraints in Section 5. Section 6 discusses another recent analysis of the case suffix/postposition dichotomy in Hungarian by Asbury (2005). Section 7 contains a short summary of the article.

2. The phonological word in Nespor and Vogel (1986)

Traditional descriptions of Hungarian state that the language exhibits vowel harmony at the word level. Thus the suffixes in (2) harmonize with the corresponding stems in backness and partially also in rounding (2a). Harmony applies to inflection (2a)-(2b) and derivation (2c) alike:

(2) Examples for vowel harmony

a. haz-ak 'houses' kert-ek 'gardens' gorog-ok 'Greeks'

house-PL garden-PL Greek-PL

b. lat-unk 'we see' szeret-unk 'we love' kuld-unk 'we send'

see-1P love-1PL send-1PL

c. fa-tlan 'treeless' szerencse-tlen 'unlucky' no-tlen 'wifeless'

tree-less luck-less wife-less

Booij (1984) argues that the domain for vowel harmony is not the morphosyntactic, but the Pword, an assumption fully taken over, along with the details of Booij's data and analysis, in the monograph on prosodic phonology by Nespor and Vogel (1986), which I will use here as the basic reference point for this type of analysis. The crucial argument for relating vowel harmony to the PWord is the fact that prefixes and different stems in compounds fail to harmonize. In other words, prefixes ((3c) and (3d)) and stems ((3a) and (3b)) can be combined with stems without changes in vowel quality: (2)

(3) Failure of harmony in prefixation and compounding

a. Buda-Pest

Buda-Pest

'Budapest'

b. konyv-tar

book-collection

'library'

c. oda-menni

there-go

'to go there'

d. be-utazni

in-commute

'to commute in'

Nespor and Vogel's analysis of these facts is based on the assumption that the PWord in Hungarian consists of a (morphologically simple) stem and (if suffixes are present) all suffixes following this stem. Thus all of the items in (4) are single morphosyntactic words, but only (4a) and (4b) form single PWords:

(4) Prosodic structure of different morphological constructions