Another Look at Velar Deletion in Turkish, with Special Attention to the Derived Environment Condition

Abstract

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2009) Another look at velar deletion in Turkish, with special attention to the derived environment condition Sharon Inkelas 1. Introduction Turkish velar deletion applies to /k/ and /g/ at the ends of stems, when rendered intervocalic by the addition of a suffix (e.g. Lewis 1967:10-11, Zimmer & Abbott 1978, Sezer 1981, Goksel & Kerslake 2005:14-17) 1 : ‘baby’ /bebek/ (nominative) Dative /-A/ Genitive /-In/ [be.bek] [be.be.e] [be.be.in] [ka.ta.log] [ka.ta.lo.a] [ka.ta.lo.un] bebek ‘catalog’ /katalog/ katalog bebege kataloga bebegin katalogun ‘mathematics’ /matematik/ [ma.te.ma.tik] [ma.te.ma.ti.e] [ma.te.ma.ti.in] matematik matematige matematigin Deleted velars are represented in the orthography as “ g ”. In some dialects they are pronounced as velar glides. 2 This paper documents the speech represented in TELL (Turkish Electronic Living Lexicon), in which the velars are phonologically and phonetically deleted. This is the pattern reported in Lewis 1967, Zimmer & Abbott 1978 and Sezer 1981, as well. The productivity of velar deletion is evidenced by its applicability to recent loans and confirmed by an experimental study by Zimmer & Abbott (1978), in which subjects were presented with a set of loanwords and asked to use them in an third person singular possessive context; the possessive suffix -/I/ is a velar deletion trigger. Zimmer & Abbott observed a deletion rate of 80-90% in the made-up words meeting the conditions for velar deletion. Velar deletion appears to be a classic derived environment effect. It applies to stem-final consonants when rendered intervocalic by suffixation, as in (1), but not to consonants which are intervocalic within a root morpheme, as in (2). Except where otherwise noted, Turkish data cited in this paper come from TELL (Turkish Electronic Living Lexicon; http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/TELL). I am grateful to Larry Hyman and Aylin Kuntay for comments on the paper, and take responsibility for any errors. 2 Even in standard Istanbul Turkish, “g” is sometimes reported to manifest as a weak labial glide between round vowels or as a weak palatal glide between front vowels (e.g. Lewis 1967:5, Goksel & Kerslake 2005:8). These glides are arguably excrescent, the expected phonetic transitions between vowels rendered adjacent by velar deletion, as in diger [dier] ‘other’.