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The data were analyzed quantitatively using version 2S of the
VARBRUL program.
The effect on vowel shortening of eight different factors was
measured. The factors were chosen on the basis of previous sociolinguistic
variation studies, hypotheses in the literature about the typewriter effect,
and the researchers' knowledge of and intuitions about the Hungarian language.
The following factors were used:
- Dependent variable:
- short vs. long, as the high
vowel was spoken on tape. The realizations of the high vowels
were coded as short or long by BSI transcribers, all of them
trained linguists; one of the transcribers, Anna Borbély, is
an author of this paper. Although Fónagy (1956) and Magdics
(1960) found that a large number of vowel realizations were
phonetically half-long, this intermediary category was not
used in the BSI transcription because of categorical speech
perception, i.e. the tendency of our perception system, which
is determined by our phonological system, to categorize all
intermediary realizations as one or the other of the
phonological categories.
- Independent variables:
- We coded four linguistic
variables
(type of vowel, tempo, following sounds, and position
within the word) and four extralinguistic variables (how the vowel was typed,
speaker, socio-economic status, and sex). These variables are described in
more detail below. At least two other factors which may have a significant
effect on vowel shortening - age and dialect background of the
speaker - were not immediately available, and therefore were
not included in this study.
- How the vowel is typed:
- short vs. long. For a high
vowel that according to standard orthography should be long,
this variable indicated whether it was typed short or long.
The effect of this variable, of course, is what we have been
calling the typewriter effect.
- Type of vowel:
- í, ú, û. The three long high vowels
differ with regard to roundness, backness, frequency, and
typical intra-word positions. In a frequency count of 500,000
running words of contemporary Hungarian fiction, Füredi and
Kelemen (1989: 430) found that the grapheme í occurred 12,622
times, ú 10,630 times, and û 4,393 times. (The frequencies
for the corresponding short graphemes are: i 104,597; u
26,306; and ü 16,461.) The high frequency of í is at least
partly due to the existence of the causative suffix -ít. In
word-final position, long í is extremely rare: there are only
16 lexemes with the final unround vowel in the best
dictionary of Standard Hungarian (cf. Papp 1969: 156), and
most of those are non-lexical words. In contrast, there are
325 lexemes ending in -ú, and 601 ending in -û. In an early
analysis of Hungarian spontaneous conversation, Szende (1973:
28) found the following frequencies in 18,000 running words
of speech: of all the phonemes /i/ occurred 3721 times
(4.69%) but /i:/ only 379 times (.48%); /ü/ occurred 311
times but /ü:/ only 175 times; /u/ 766 times but /u:/ only
207 times.
- Tempo:
- normal vs. fast. Ács and Siptár (1994: 555)
classify vowel shortening as one of the lenition processes
characteristic of fast speech. Kontra (1995: 15-16) found
that in normal reading tempo, five out of ten teachers
pronounced the final vowel in fésû 'comb' long, but in fast
reading only two teachers pronounced it long. However, tempo
had no effect on the vocational trainees' reading. Kassai
(1991: 97) explains this in the following way: at normal
rate, vocational trainees pronounce nearly twice as many
short vowels for standard long vowels as do teachers,
therefore "in vocational trainees' fast reading there is
hardly any long vowel left for fast rate to shorten."
- Following sounds:
- no following sound, one vowel, one
consonant, two identical consonants, two different
consonants. The sounds that followed the vowel being
investigated were coded as vowels or consonants, with a
distinction made between one or two following consonants; in
the latter case, the identity or lack of identity of the
consonants was also coded. Note that in the case of a
following vowel, that vowel was always different from the
vowel being investigated; in other words, vowels were never
doubled.
As we will discuss below, we measured the effect of the
following sounds within three linguistic units: the morpheme,
the word, and the intonation unit (i.e. stress group). We
restricted the data coded for this variable to sounds that
belonged to the same intonation unit as the vowel being
investigated: we assumed that the intonation unit was spoken
without an interior pause, and therefore that the realization
of the vowel in question could have been influenced by the
following sounds within that unit.
Therefore, vowels occurring at the
end of an intonation unit were not included in the analysis for this
variable, because it would have been impossible to establish the presence or
absence of a pause after the vowel without listening to the recordings
once again. This restriction reduced the data for this variable by a small
amount (see note 4.4): in two cases, the vowel in question occurred at an
intonation unit (stress group) boundary in the two passages (fölmerült
a gyanu, hogy... 'The suspicion arose that...' in passage 1, and
Felmerült a gyanú, hogy... in passage 5).
- Position of the vowel within the word:
- wordfinal vs.
non-wordfinal.
- Speaker.
- There were 17 speakers, and it was assumed
that the variation could be speaker-dependent.
- Socio-economic status.
- Speakers belong to one of
five SES's: teachers, university students, sales clerks,
blue-collar workers, and vocational trainees.
- Sex:
- male vs. female.
Next: Results
Up: Methodology
Previous: Methodology
Varadi Tamas
1998-10-08