7 BOUNDARY MARKING IN HUNGARIAN V(#)V CLUSTERS WITH SPECIAL REGARD TO THE ROLE OF IRREGULAR PHONATION Alexandra Markó Department of Phonetics, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest e-mail: marko.alexandra@btk.elte.hu Abstract In the present paper, the realization of vowel clusters in Hungarian speech is analyzed. We focus our attention on cases in which the speaker wishes to highlight, rather than resolve, a hiatus – by employing irregular phonation. Glottalization occurred the most frequently (31.1%) across word boundaries; sometimes (with a frequency below 10%). It also happened morpheme internally or across compound boundaries. Glottalized word transitions were realized mostly at phrase boundaries (stress also influenced the occurrence of glottalization). Another major motivation for a glottalized realization of V(#)V clusters was to avoid the use of some phonological/articulatory mechanism (hiatus resolution or deletion). A large amount of inter-speaker variance was shown by the frequency of occurrence of glottalization. 1 Introduction Hiatus is a heterosyllabic sequence of adjacent vowels, which is a dispreferred configuration in many languages (Siptár, 2002: 85). “Some languages disallow the occurrence of hiatus altogether; others prevent some instances from arising by various means but let others surface or resolve them in some surface-phonological manner” (Siptár, 2008: 189). The diverse means of avoiding hiatus include (1) the elision of one or the other vowel (e.g. barna ‘brown’ + ít > barnít ‘embrown’, kocsi ‘car’ + on > kocsin ‘by car’), (2) glide formation: the change of one or the other vowel into a glide (e.g. kaleidoszkóp > kale[j]doszkóp ‘kaleidoscope’), and (3) “hiatus resolution”, i.e., the spread of some segmental content from one of the flanking vowel positions into the empty onset position (e.g. dió > di[j]ó ‘walnut’) (Siptár, 2012). In present-day Hungarian, regular hiatus resolution involves the consonant j, whose occurrence depends on the quality of the vowels constituting the cluster. Hiatus is invariably resolved if one of the two vowels concerned is i [i] or í [i] (ki[j]áltás ‘a cry’, si[j]et ‘hurry’, nő[j]i ‘woman-adj.’), and it is also often resolved if one of the vowels is é [e] (if the é comes first, j-insertion is optional: po[j]én ‘punch line’ vs. melléáll [mɛleal] ‘stand by’ – for the exact criteria of this, e.g. Siptár and Törkenczy, 2000: 283–284). In other cases, hiatus resolution by [j] is not likely,