László Kálmán: Papers from the Mókus Conference - Segédkönyvek a nyelvészet tanulmányozásához 84. (Budapest, 2008)

Ágnes Lukács - Péter Rebrus - Miklós Törkenczy: Paradigmatic space and defectiveness in Hungarian: An empirical study

PARADIGMATIC SPACE AND DEFECTIVENESS IN HUNGARIAN An empirical study Ágnes Lukács*^ Péter Rebrus^^ Miklós Törkenczy*0'1’ * Cognitive Science Research Group, BME/HAS, Budapest ^ Research Institute for Linguistics, HAS, Budapest ^ Department of Theoretical Linguistics, ELTE/HAS, Budapest * Department of English Linguistics, SEAS, ELTE, Budapest {alukacs.rebrus,tork}@nytud.hu 1 Introduction The present study has three main objectives: (i) primarily, we wanted to test experimentally the assumptions/hypotheses un­derlying the analysis of phonologically motivated paradigm gaps in Hungar­ian proposed in a recent paper (Rebrus and Törkenczy, 2007); and (ii) secondarily, as a by-product, we wanted to examine how speakers assign verb stems into the stem-classes (especially the classes of epenthetic, defective and stable CC-stems) that the analysis assumes, (iii) also, we wanted to examine the range of variation displayed by the forms that native speakers accept as fill-ins for the gaps that occur in the paradigms of defective verbs. Grammaticality judgements of these forms are especially difficult to study because of the individual variation and hesitation that characterise the repair strategies of native speakers. This paper is organised in the following way: In section 2 we give a brief descrip­tion of the verbal stem and affix classes and defective verbal paradigms in Hungarian. In section 3 we summarise Rebrus & Törkenczy’s analysis, and on the basis of the analysis we formulate the hypotheses to be experimentally tested. Finally, in sec­tion 4 we describe the experiment and analyse the results. It must be pointed out here that this paper is a report on work in progress — some of the results remain to be analysed.

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