Feature domains and covert harmony in Turkish: The exceptional transparency of /a/ (original) (raw)

Vowel Harmony and Other Morphological Processes in Turkish

Vowel harmony appears to be a regular phonological process in Turkish, but nevertheless is not exceptionless. Due to these exceptions, it cannot be considered as part of the active phonology of Turkish. An analysis is proposed in which morphology and lexicon control vowel harmony and other processes similar in this regard. Morphology is unlike other modules of grammar in requiring access to all of syntactic, semantic, and phonological properties to function. One of the roles of morphology is to give commands to the phonology during formation of a complex word, such as "Carry out vowel harmony!" The phonology need not account for why such a command does not accompany certain suffixes, why it does not apply to all roots, nor why other commands only accompany a few suffixes. More generally, there is no need for phonology to access morphological information in a modular model of grammar.

Turkish palatalized consonants and vowel harmony

2020

This study aims to explore the nature of consonant-final Turkish roots that select suffixes with front vowels despite having a back vowel in their final syllable, thus seemingly violating palatal harmony. While there is little controversy that final laterals in such roots are palatalized, opinions vary about the phonetic and phonological nature of the other final consonants. We want to argue that all wordfinal (or occasionally penultimate) consonants of these roots are palatalized, and that this palatalization is the underlying cause of ‘disharmony’. The phonetic evidence supporting our claims comes from an experiment in which we matched 12 irregular roots with their regular counterparts and asked 10 native speakers of Turkish to read these words. We found that, compared to ‘regular’ roots ending with a plain consonant, the final consonants of ‘irregular’ roots have a significantly higher F2. The last vowels of ‘irregular’ roots were also found to have a somewhat higher F2 than the ...

Inalienability and Syncopation in Turkish

1. Syncopation before derivational suffixes As should be well known, high medial vowels of Turkic words often get dropped when syllable structure makes it possible. This happens to a different extent in different Turkic languages; in Turkmen, e.g., vowel syncopation is much more general than in Turkish. This paper will, however, be limited to Turkish.

Loan Word Adaptation and Vowel Harmony in Turkish A Government Phonology Account console xx

Console XX, 2012

The study aims at investigating the adaptation of the loan words in Turkish and their relation to vowel harmony. I specifically focus on the loan words with final and initial consonant clusters within the framework of Government Phonology proposed in Kaye, Lowenstamm & Vergnaud (1990). Following Charette (1991, 2004), I propose that the loan words with initial (s(ı)por ‘sport’) and final (fik(i)r ‘idea’) clusters are not allowed in Turkish; thus, these words have a lexically empty position between the consonants of the clusters when adapted to Turkish. This implies that there is no consonant insertion or deletion for the adaptation of the loan words. The empty nucleus position is realized if it fails to be p-licensed (phonological licensing). I focus on why and how the empty position is realized. My claim is that the word final empty nucleus position cannot properly govern the empty position of the previous nucleus given that p-licensing fails (Kaye, 1990). Hence, the vowel has to be realized via U and I harmony in the light of licensing constraints given in Charette & Göksel (1994). The realization of the empty nucleus position in the adapted words with initial clusters follows some patterns other than vowel harmony and licensing constraints. The present study suggests that there is no epenthesis phenomenon in loan words with consonant clusters, but the issue is related to the realization of the empty nucleus which depends on the p-licensing phenomenon.

Lexical strata and vowel (dis)harmony: The Turkish transformation of a Balkan hypocoristic

In this study I explore the phonological behavior of the hypocoristic suffix /-oʃ/-/iʃ/ in Turkish. Such a suffix is common to many of the Balkan languages. Turkish differs in its introduction of the front vowel variant of the suffix, presumably to satisfy the vowel harmony requirements in Turkish for backness and rounding in high vowels. However, in spite of the potentially alternating suffix allomorphs, collection of naturalistic data as well as of elicited survey data reveals that the majority of nickname outputs are disharmonic. I conclude that the Turkish data provides further evidence for Ito and Mester's (2009) key insight that different strata of the lexicon may operate according to different rules/constraint rankings. However, the Turkish data is not consistent with their specific faithfulness-based approach. The hypocoristic lexical stratum exhibits a greater number of vowel harmony violations, but not due to more faithfulness to vowel inputs/underlying forms. Rather, the harmony violations in this stratum are gratuitous – I argue, precisely in order to distinguish this stratum from the lexicon at large. An approach such as Pater's (2010) indexed constraints model better accommodates this type of lexical variation.

Turkish palatalized consonants

Proceedings of the Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic, 2020

This study aims to explore the nature of consonant-final Turkish roots that select suffixes with front vowels despite having a back vowel in their final syllable, thus seemingly violating palatal harmony. While there is little controversy that final laterals in such roots are palatalized, opinions vary about the phonetic and phonological nature of the other final consonants. We want to argue that all word-final (or occasionally penultimate) consonants of these roots are palatalized, and that this palatalization is the underlying cause of ‘disharmony’. The phonetic evidence supporting our claims comes from an experiment in which we matched 12 irregular roots with their regular counterparts and asked 10 native speakers of Turkish to read these words. We found that, compared to ‘regular’ roots ending with a plain consonant, the final consonants of ‘irregular’ roots have a significantly higher F2. The last vowels of ‘irregular’ roots were also found to have a somewhat higher F2 than the...