The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition

Volume 2: Theoretical Issues

Dan Isaac Slobin

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134930937
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology

See Volume I (0-89859-367-0) for full description and TOC.

14 Hungarian Language Acquisition as an Exemplification of a General Model of Grammatical Development

Brian MacWhinney

Carnegie-Mellon University

Contents

Descriptive Sketch of Hungarian

Phonology

Morphology

Morphophonology

Ordering

Agreement

Sources of Data

The Overall Course of Development

The Competition Model

Competition in the Lexicon

Applications of the Model to the Development of Phonology

Rote, Analogy, and Combination (Operating Principles 1, 2, and 3)

Patterns (Operating Principle 4)

Competition (Operating Principle 5)

Rule Acquisition (Operating Principles 10 and 15)

Item Acquisition (Operating Principle 11)

Amalgam Analysis (Operating Principle 12)

Merger (Operating Principle 14)

Applications of the Model to the Acquisition of Syntax

Rote, Analogy, and Combination (Operating Principles 1, 2, and 3)

Patterns (Operating Principle 4)

Competition (Operating Principle 5)

Rule Acquisition (Operating Principles 10 and 15)

Item Acquisition (Operating Principle 11)

Amalgam Analysis (Operating Principle 12)

Applications of the Model to the Acquisition of Lexical Semantics

Rote, Analogy, and Combination (Operating Principles 1, 2, and 3)

Patterns (Operating Principle 4)

Competition (Operating Principle 5)

Rule Acquisition (Operating Principles 10 and 15)

Item Acquisition (Operating Principle 11)

Amalgam Analysis of Morpheme Acquisition (Operating Principle 12)

Inference (Operating Principle 13)

Suggestions for Further Study

Theoretical Implications

Hungarian is a member of the Ugric branch of the Ugro-Finnic language family. In the pre-Christian era the ancestors of the modern Hungarians inhabited an area between the Volga and Dnieper rivers in Central Asia. Subsequent migrations brought them into close contact with Turkic peoples in the area north of the Black Sea. Around 800 A.D., the Hungarians, who call themselves Magyars, entered the Carpathian Basin, occupying most of the area of modern Hungary. They have remained in the Carpathian Basin up to the present date, maintaining close contact with speakers of Slavic, Germanic, Romance, and Turkic languages. Despite these close contacts and despite massive lexical borrowing, Hungarian maintains many of its original Ugro-Finnic characteristics. These include vowel harmony, pragmatically flexible word order, an elaborate set of “agglutinative” case suffixes, an extensive system of aspect markers, verb-object agreement, placement of the noun in the singular when there is a quantifier that is in the plural, a basic SOV word order, and a tendency toward incorporation of the object into the verb. As we see below, each of these characteristically Ugro-Finnic features of Hungarian provides interesting data that can be brought to bear upon hypotheses regarding language acquisition strategies. We also see that many of these data are directly relevant to the universal operating principles that have been suggested by Slobin (1973), MacWhinney (1978), and others.

1. DESCRIPTIVE SKETCH OF HUNGARIAN

This sketch examines five major areas of grammar: phonology, morphology, morphophonology, ordering, and agreement. It uses as its basic reference the two-volume descriptive grammar assembled by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Tompa, 1970). Unfortunately, that grammar is only available in Hungarian. For those who do not read Hungarian, the only reference that is of any value at all is the textbook Learn Hungarian by Bánhidi, Jókay, and Szabó (1965). This textbook provides a fairly good account of Hungarian morphology and phonology, but it is weak in the areas of morphophonology, ordering, and lexical structure.

1.1. Phonology

There are at least three major types of phonological patterns: segmental patterns, phonotactic patterns, and morphophonological patterns. Here we briefly examine patterns of the first two types; the morphophonological patterns of Hungarian are considered in a later section.

TABLE 14.1
Hungarian Consonants

1.1.1. Segmental Patterns

The Hungarian sound system is summarized in Tables 14.1 to 14.3. The letters between slashes are International Phonetic Association symbols for each phoneme. The letters outside the slashes are the symbols of standard Hungarian orthography. Table 14.1 displays the system of 44 consonants; Table 14.2 summarizes the phonetic status of the 14 vowel phonemes (e and ë are dialect variants); and Table 14.3 displays the seven groupings relevant to the phonological processes of vowel harmony (explained below). Note that the phonetic basis of groups 6 and 7 is fairly opaque.

TABLE 14.2
Hungarian Vowels

TABLE 14.3
Hungarian Vowel Harmony Groups

	Back	Front	Front Rounded
1.	u		ü
2.	ú		ű
3.	o	e,ë	ö
4.	ó		ő
5.	a	e
6.	á	é
7.	ja	i

1.1.2. Phonotactics

Hungarian has several phonological rules that operate both within and between words. We will call such general phonological rules phonotactic rules. Phonotactic effects on vowels in Hungarian are quite different from those in Indo-European. Vowel sequences are never diphthongized except in some foreign words with /au/. However an epenthetic /j/ may be inserted into some vowel sequences. Thus fiú becomes fijú and fáért becomes fájért. This process is subject to stylistic, tempo, and dialect variation.

Consonants show an allophonic accommodation of place to the following consonant or vowel. Thus /k/ is velar in kutya but palatal in kicsi and /n/ becomes labiodental /m/ in honfi. Voicing also assimilates regressively in consonant clusters. Thus kapd is pronounced kabd. This assimilation involves a series of allophonic alternations, since phonemes like /m/ that do not have a voiceless counterpart do not devoice. If a dental or palatal stop precedes a fricative, the stop and fricative merge into a long affricate that has the place of articulation of the affricate. Thus, hegycsucs becomes heccsucs and egyszer becomes etsser. Similarly, dental palatal stops followed by /j/ become long palatals. Thus hagyja becomes haggya and kutja becomes kuttya. Finally, long consonants shorten in clusters. Thus benn van becomes ben van and sarkkör becomes sarkör.

Vowel harmony operates both phonotactically and morphologically. Phonotactically, Hungarian words avoid the combination of any of the back vowels (u,ú,o,ó,a,á) with any of the front vowels (ö,ő,ü,ű, and e). However this pattern has numerous exceptions, particularly for recent loan words.

1.2. Morphology

Hungarian morphemes can be divided into stems and affixes. In this section we review the most important types of affixes.

The largest class of Hungarian affixes is the class of formative suffixes or kepzők. These are parallel to suffixes like -ate, -ness, -some, -al, and -ly in English. Like their English counterparts, most of these suffixes are fairly low in productivity. Nonetheless, as we will see in the section on child neologisms (particularly Table 5), there is a fair amount of evidence for some productivity for at least 25 formatives. There are also a few morphemes that are traditionally regarded as formatives, but which really act like productive inflections. These include the comparative suffix -bb, the superlative which uses the prefix leg-along with the suffix -bb, the hyperlative which adds the prefix leges-to the superlative, and the infinitive -ni. All of these “formatives” function much like inflections.

There are 25 nominal case suffixes in Hungarian. However only about 15 of these can be freely combined with any noun in a fully inflectional way. These include the nine locatives (inessive, illative, elative, superessive, sublative, and delative, adessive, ablative, allative), the dative, the instrumental, the accusative, the terminative, the causal-final and the translative-factitive. The sounds and meanings of these 18 case suffixes are as follows:

1. Inessive: stative position inside an enclosure, -ban, -ben.

2. Illative: moving toward toward a position inside an enclosure, -ba, -be.

3. Elative: moving away from a position inside an enclosure: -ból, -ből.

4. Superessive: stative position on a horizontal surface, -on, -en, -ön, -n.

5. Sublative: moving toward a position on a horizontal surface, -ra, -re.

6. Delative: moving away from a position on a horizontal surface, -ról, -ről.

7. Adessive: stative position at a point, -nál, -nél.

8. Ablative: moving toward a position at a point, -hoz, -hez, -höz.

9. Allative: moving away from a position at a point, -tól, -től.

10. Nominative: the unmarked form of the noun, the first mover (there is no passive in Hungarian).

11. Accusative: the direct object or element most affected by the action of the verb, -t, -ot, -et, -öt, -at.

12. Dative: the recipient or indirect object of the verb, -nak, -nek.

13. Instrumental/comitative: resembles English ‘with’, -val, -vel.

14. Terminative: movement up to an end -ig.

15. Causal-final: reason for an action, -ért.

16. Translative-factive: changing to a state, -vá, -vé.

The other flectional suffixes in Hungarian are called “signs” or jelek. They include the plural, the possessives (marked on the noun possessed), and the verbal inflections. Plurality merges with the various possessive suffixes to yield a set of portmanteau forms. Thus, although -ok is the sign of the plural and -om is the sign of first person possession, the combination of plurality and first person singular possession yields not -okom but -aim. Also, when a possessive occurs with the accusative, the accusative may be optionally deleted.

For both the possessive markers on the nou...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Volume 2: Theoretical Issues
• Format and Abbreviations for Glosses
• 11. Cognitive Prerequisites: The Evidence from Children Learning English Judith R. Johnston
• 12. Function, Structure, and Language Acquisition Talmy Givón
• 13. Language Segmentation: Operating Principles for the Perception and Analysis of Language Ann M. Peters
• 14. Hungarian Language Acquisition as an Exemplification of a General Model of Grammatical Development Brian MacWhinney
• 15. Crosslinguistic Evidence for the Language-Making Capacity Dan I. Slobin
• 16. What Shapes Children’s Grammars? Melissa Bowerman
• Subject Index
• Author Index