Hungarian shows variable front vowel harmony, particularly in suffixed back vowel
+ [epsilon] nouns. The study aims to address two main research questions: (1) To what
extent does stem-level information (similarity across stems) predict suffix variation
for back vowel + [epsilon] stems in Hungarian corpus data? (2) Do suffixes themselves
predict suffix variation beyond the stem-level information? We draw on a dataset of
200 noun stems, 4,501 suffixed forms and 4 x 106 tokens, based on the New Hungarian
Webcorpus, and use a K-Nearest Neighbours learner and a hierarchical generalised linear
model to address these questions. We find that the majority of back vowel + [epsilon]
stems show variable vowel harmony, that this depends on stem similarity and that similarity
effects are amplified by vowel-initial suffixes. This points to a model of Hungarian
vowel harmony in which stem- and suffix-level information are lexically specified.
