Towards a model of intonational phonology of Turkish: Neutral intonation

Abstract

This study proposes an Autosegmental-Metrical model of Turkish intonation based on sentences produced in neutral focus, as part of our ongoing research investigating Turkish intonational phonology. Tonal patterns of utterances were examined by varying the length of a word and a phrase, the location of stress, syntactic structures, and sentence types. Preliminary results suggest that Turkish has a H* pitch accent, realized on the stressed syllable of most content words. Each content word forms one Prosodic Word (PW) whose left edge is marked by an L tone. There are two prosodic units higher than PW: an Intermediate Phrase (ip) marked by a final rising (LH) tone and an Intonational Phrase (IP) marked by various types of a final boundary tone. These three prosodic units are also distinguished by the degree of juncture. Interestingly, the ip-final LH boundary tone marks the right edge of a heavy syntactic constituent regardless of the length of the unit. Furthermore, the left edge of a nuclear pitch accent is also marked by a rising tone (LH), which is realized on the last syllable of the immediately preceding PW. The ip-final LH tone and the pre-nuclear LH tone are phonetically different and perceptually distinct.