A quantitative analysis of the variable linking vowel of the Hungarian accusative
Abstract
If a Hungarian noun stem ends in a coronal sonorant + coronal fricative consonant cluster, the linking vowel of the accusative can vary (klienset / klienst ‘client.acc’). The phonotactics of the language does not completely account for this behaviour. The existing literature points to phonetic, lexical, and analogical factors. We use data drawn from the 2nd Hungarian Webcorpus to expand on existing descriptive work and determine the factors driving variation in the linking vowel. Our results point towards a novel explanation, namely, that the variable pattern is the result of a lexical gang effect.
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