Abstract
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 last vowels of ‘regular’ roots at their offset, but the difference fairly rapidly decreases at vowel midpoint, and at vowel onset F2 values are very similar in both ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ roots. These combined results suggest that the final consonant of the ‘irregular’ roots has an underlying palatal secondary articulation, while fronting in the preceding vowels is likely due to co-articulation.
Highlights
Vowel harmony is probably the best known and most well-studied aspect of Turkish phonology
This paper aims to offer an account of the phonological behavior of this class of roots
The consonant in aç was added for comparison; the F2 values of coronal stops in ‘irregular’ roots are much closer to that consonant than to plain coronal stops. This is not true of Rab and idrak, but they are not counterexamples to our claim that only roots with a final palatalized consonant select front vowel suffixes; in the fill-in-the-blanks task that followed the recording task, all our subjects inflected both words with back vowel suffixes
Summary
Vowel harmony is probably the best known and most well-studied aspect of Turkish phonology. We want to argue – on the basis of acoustic data we collected in an experiment – that the final consonant of ‘irregular’ roots is phonetically palatalized We interpret this phonetic palatalization as evidence that phonologically ‘irregular’ roots have a contrastive palatal secondary articulation (in other words, we want to argue that Turkish has more contrastively palatalized consonants than the commonly assumed velar stops and lateral – so, for example, we suppose that the underlying representation of saat is /saatj/). We will argue that this contrastive palatalization in rootfinal consonants is the reason for the fronting of subsequent vowels, since palatalized consonants are specified as [–back] segments Under such an account the presence of apparently disharmonic front vowels after these roots is not an unpredictable lexical idiosyncrasy, but the regular outcome of the interaction between consonantal secondary articulations and vowels
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