The Phonology of Turkish

Abstract

The Phonology of Turkish offers a comprehensive overview and analysis of the phonological structure of modern Turkish. While phenomena at both segmental and suprasegmental levels are discussed, the emphasis is on the latter, analyzing phonological processes extending over a number of different domains. Couched within a primarily constraint-based framework, lower-level prosodic constituents, including syllables, feet, and prosodic words, are incorporated into a general theory with higher-level constituents, the Phonological Phrase and the Intonational Phrase, assuming that phonological structure is hierarchical in nature and that phonological representations consist of more than a single linear sequence of segments. The approach employed here, thus, uses tools from both Prosodic Phonology and Autosegmental Phonology (theories of representation), as well as Optimality Theory (OT) (a theory of computation). More specifically, with regard to the representation of the internal structure of segments, Autosegmental Phonology, and in some cases a more refined variant, Feature Geometry, is used, while Prosodic Phonology is employed for levels of the Prosodic Hierarchy beyond the segment, such as feet, prosodic words and phonological phrases. The book strives to achieve two things; it provides a critical synthesis of research in Turkish phonology, as well as offering new analyses and data in a theoretically oriented approach. One repetitive and overarching theme emerging in every chapter throughout the book is that not only regular but also exceptional phonological forms demonstrate a systematic pattern, despite conveniently being referred to as “exceptional,” and can be captured by the same grammar as regular forms, be it a segmental process (Chapter 2), a syllable repair process (Chapter 3), vowel harmony (Chapter 4), word stress (Chapter 5), or phrasal prominence (Chapter 6). I maintain that exceptional information in phonology should be captured via prespecification, but of a special type that puts minimal information in underlying forms. Prespecification of the type defended here does not place language-specific restrictions on inputs/underlying representations; rather, inputs can have any shape, and all possible inputs are accounted for by the same grammar/phonology. Phonology on this view essentially acts as a filter to only give surface representations that are actually utterable by speakers of the Turkish language.