Siptár Péter, Törkenczy Miklós. The Phonology of Hungarian

New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. — xiv, 323 p. — (The Phonology of the World’s Languages). — ISBN 978-0-19-922890-4.This book presents a rule-based account of the phonology of Hungarian. At a time when current phonological research is undergoing a radical shift of emphasis towards non-derivational models (Declarative Phonology, Government Phonology, Optimality Theory), this choice of framework calls for a brief comment. Our decision to use a derivational framework follows from our primary aims rather than our theoretical preferences. As (with the notable exception of vowel harmony) Hungarian phonology is relatively little discussed in the international literature, we wanted to cover as much ground as possible descriptively, and discuss the data in a manner which is coherent and yet transparent in the sense that it is readily accessible for phonologists of a wide range of theoretical affiliations and backgrounds. As the various non-derivational frameworks have very little in common and (some of) their (basic) assumptions are still in a state of flux, this has practically determined our decision. It is perhaps not surprising that while several (sometimes very complex) phenomena from various languages have been given non-derivational treatments, no comprehensive analysis of the sound pattern of a single language has been published in any of these non-derivational theories.
The dialect described is Educated Colloquial Hungarian (ECH), the spoken language of ‘educated’ people living in Budapest, the capital of Hungary. That dialect (cf. Nádasdy 1985) contrasts with Standard Literary Hungarian (SLH), the speech of conservative or speech-conscious speakers on the one hand and with various types of non-standard speech, including traditional rural dialects (cf. section 2.2.3), on the other. Both authors are native speakers of ECH.
In addition to native speaker judgements that underlie all data and generalizations presented in this book, the description of some of the phonological phenomena discussed here is based on a computerized database (cf. Kornai 1986a) comprising phonological (and other types of) information concerning approximately 80,000 lexical items.