Voice and Aspiration of Stops in Turkish

Abstract

According to the descriptive grammars of Turkish (Kornfilt 1997, Swift 1963, Lewis 1967, among others) and underspecification-based analysis of Turkish (Inkelas 1995), stops have a two-way contrast: voiced unaspirated vs. voiceless aspirated. Moreover, voiced stops are described as fully voiced in all positions. By contrast, it is argued in this paper that Turkish has a three-way contrast of stops, which is a combination of [spread glottis] and [voice] contrasts. More specifically, Turkish stops contrast as voiceless aspirated vs. voiceless unaspirated vs. voiced. Support for the claim comes from an acoustic-phonetic experimental study of Turkish. In this study a native male speaker of Turkish was recorded and analyzed acoustically with a speech analysis software package (Wavesurfer). In addition, a list of words read by a native female speaker of Turkish from the University of Victoria Phonetic Database was analyzed. The acoustic analysis of the data shows that Turkish has voiceless aspirated stops in all positions in a word. Voiced stops are found in intervocalic position, word-finally and in consonant clusters. Moreover, the data reveal voiceless unaspirated stops in word-initial position and in consonant clusters. In order to account for the data, an OT analysis of the three-way contrast of stops is proposed. This analysis entails that *sg and *voice are low-ranking in Turkish. Once this three-way contrast is acknowledged, a straightforward alternative to the underspecification analysis of Inkelas (1995) is possible.