Second stems in Hungarian nouns
Barbara Stiebels, Dieter Wunderlich · The Linguistic Review · 1999
In this paper we present a unified account of irregular noun stems (second stems) ) in Hungarian ; these stems are selected just in those cases where the noun combines with suffixes that have an initial non-moraic vowel (type III suffixes), regardless of the derivational or inflectional status of the suffix. The observed stem-suffix combinations turn out to be optimal under the assumption that underlyingly, the second stems have an unlinked mora and type III suffixes lack any moraic structure. The candidates that are evaluated by an ordered set of constraints are exclusively formed by the concatenation of stems and suffixes; all possible alternations result from options to be taken at the morpheme boundaries