Measuring

TL;DR: The Hungarian language exhibits resyllabification, as evidenced by the measured duration of word-ending consonants compared with word-initial consonants. The phenomenon appeared in 30,77–69,23% of the possible cases.

Abstract: In this paper, I am focusing on the possible existence of resyllabification (linking) in the Hungarian language by looking for acoustic cues. Twenty-one Hungarian sentences have been read out loud by thirteen native speakers of the language. Following the method presented by Fougeron et al. (2003), the duration of the possibly resyllabified, word-ending consonants (derived onsets) has been measured and compared with the duration of word-initial consonants (canonical onsets), without possible resyllabification. The results of this study show the possible occurrence of linking in Hungarian (the phenomenon appeared in the 30,77–69,23% of the possible cases), regardless of the word types the analyzed contexts contain. On the other hand, it has been demonstrated that resyllabification is more frequent in the comment (at the end) of a sentence than in the topic (sentence-initial position). However, further investigations should be carried out in this field in the future, in particular, a prosodic analysis (based on intonation and stress) could shed light on more obvious patterns.