Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 91. kötet (1990)

Tanulmányok - Kornai, András: The sonority hierarchy in Hungarian 139

THE SONORITY HIERARCHY IN HUNGÁRIÁN 145 of course, this will have to be stored with V-initial and V-final syllables as well, so as to know which is which. The consonants can be arranged among each other on the basis of sonority: the more sonorant a consonant, the closer it cornes to the vowel. This proposai can be implemented without recourse to an abstract scale if we take it into account that sonority can be expressed in terms of features .To quote Basboll (1973. 132): "In fact, the claim is that the features of the "hierarchy' are distributed around the peak of the syllable, so that each feature may spread continuously over several segments in the way indicated in the hierarchy. This could be formulated so that 'one instance of ' e.g. the feature <+sonorant> 'belongs to' several segments at the same time." In autosegmental terms this means that the tiniing units must be arranged around the vowel in such a manner that the features linked to them can undergo contour simplification maximally. For instance, in the monosyllable brancs 'gang', we have to store only the facts that b and r précède, and n and es follow the vowel. The alternative ordering *bracsn is excluded because the <+son> features of n and the vowel are not adjacent, and thus cannot be simplified. Similarly, the order *rbancs can be excluded because the <+son> of r can not be collapsed with that of the vowel, and the order *rbacsn is excluded even more strongly, as it would require 3 instances of <+son> instead of the optimal 1. From this perspective, the existence of isolated counterexamples is not really worrysome: with those, we will simply have to store more LP information. The mechanism outlined above acts as a default: extra information concerning the position of the features can override it. This means that it matters but little whether we have proper names, foreign, or learned words: it is quite conceivable that such items require a larger amount of storage in a system that works best with native words. Inflected forms, however, belong in a différent class, at least if we suppose that thèse are not stored in the lexicon but are created 'on the fly'. In generating a form liké lopj 'steal 2nd.sg.imp.indef ' we know that the sufnx j will follow the stem lop, so the default mechanism need not be engaged at ail. ANDRÁS KORNAI Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 91. 1990.