Monotonicity and the limits of disharmony

The attested front/back harmony systems are monotonic in the sense thatthe harmony function that assigns the values front and back to suffixes ingiven harmonic stem contexts is subject to a constraint that only permitscontiguous patterns of values on a universally fixed scale of harmoniccontexts (ranging from the prototypical back harmony context [...B]_ tothe prototypical front one [...F]_ ). We argue that monotonicity alsoconstrains variation (harmony patterns involving the harmonic valuefront/back) and show that in Hungarian the harmonic properties of a stem(front, back, variable front/back) are inherited by the forms derived fromthe stem by inflection or derivation. This paradigm uniformity effect(Harmonic Uniformity) results in subpatterns of front/back harmony whichalso conform to monotonicity. We demonstrate this using frequency datafrom a corpus study.