Nyelvtudományi közlemények 91. kötet (1990)

134 MIKLÓS KONTRA
unaspirated), all but one wrote podium. Thus here listeners "added" aspiration
to the perceived phonetic shape. When context invited listeners "to
add" voicing to what they heard (e.g. John grew a pushy beard, with pushy
pronounced with an unaspirated p), they did so: 17 out of 26 subjects wrote
bushy. However, when context made genuine ambiguity possible, as in Did
you say Ted? (with Ted unaspirated), subjects' responses were different: 14
wrote dead, 5 Ted, and 7 wrote other words (e.g. Ed, said, bed) or nothing.
It seems, then, that native speakers adjust the heard phonetic shapes to the
linguistic context, and they do so whenever context makes such adjustment
possible.
To turn from perception to production, let us consider the vowel
harmony observable in certain Hungarian (loan)words. As is well known,
in general, harmonic suffix vowels agree in backness with harmonic root
vowels. Loanwords, however, often violate harmony restrictions and some
of them allow either front or back suffix vowels, e.g. Ágnesnek/Agnesnak
'Agnes+dative,' fotelnek/fotelnak 'armchair-fdative' etc. Vago (1980. 14)
calls these alternants doublets and states that they "are in free variation."
Elicitation experiments have suggested, however, that the phonological
and morphological context of the sentence in which a vacillating loanword
occurs may influence harmonic suffix vowel choice. When subjects had to
provide the appropriate suffix for the word karakter 'character' in different
test sentences, their choices were influenced by the test sentences. For instance,
significantly more subjects used the front suffix -ben 'in' in a sentence
like (1)
(1) Ebben a karakter... nincs fantázia.
than in (2)
(2) Abban a karakter... sincs semmi érdekes.
That is: when the test word followed a word with the front vowel allomorph
of the same suffix as was appropriate for the test word, 93.9% of the subjects
used the front allomorph, but only 78.8% did so when the back allomorph of
the elicited test suffix occurred in the sentence (cf. Kontra and Ringen 1986.
11-12).
Recent elicitation experiments show that morphological context does
indeed account for a good deal of the vacillation in the suffocation of certain
Hungarian (loan)words. 59 subjects were presented with 36 sentences,
each containing an uninflected word followed by a blank, and were asked
to supply the appropriate suffix. Three test words were used in twelve different
contexts. All three words vacillate: férfi 'man' (an opaque compound
allowing either back or front allomorphs of certain suffixes), sláger 'hit tune'
Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 91. 1990.