Turkish palatalized consonants

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

Binomial expressions as a window on the phonological system of Turkish

The principles governing word order in binomial expressions have been investigated in a few languages, revealing the relevance of several interacting semantic and phonological constraints, some of them universal or near-universal while others appear to be more language-specific. This paper presents the results of a preliminary quantitative analysis of some constraints influencing word order in Turkish irreversible binomials. We found that semantic constraints referring to the semantic prominence and iconic order of the items of the binomial, a constraint placing loanwords in final position, suprasegmental phonological constraints referring to syllable count, presence of onsets and presence of codas, segmental phonological constraints referring to the sonority of consonants, vowel roundness and presence of an initial labial consonant, all influence word order in Turkish irreversible binomials. Furthermore, the evidence from the segmental constraints may also shed light on some aspects of the Turkish phonological system, i.e. the markedness of rounded vowels and labial consonants, the properties of the sonority scale in Turkish and the featural specification of Turkish /j/

High vowel shortening in Turkish

High vowel weakening is a common phenomenon that usually depends on purely phonetic factors. This study aims to present the findings of an experiment we have conducted on a total of 14 native speakers to see if Turkish has high vowel weakening and if yes, to figure out whether it is phonological or phonetic. Our data show a large amount of variation and little correlation between a vowel’s F1 and its duration within the high ([+high], /i, u, y, ɯ/) and non-high ([-high], /a, e, o, ø/) categories in all environments (stressed and unstressed, in open and closed syllables, in all consonantal environments). On the other hand, comparing the duration of [+high] and [-high] vowels reveals that non-high vowels are rarely as short as, or shorter than, high vowels. However, this shortening process is not a purely phonetic phenomenon. What matters for this process to apply is the phonological category of the vowel. All [+high] vowels are shortened, largely irrespective of variation in their F1; conversely, [-high] vowels are not shortened, largely irrespective of variation in their F1

The voiced and voiceless outcomes of intervocalic -SJ- in Old Tuscan

This paper deals with the non-systematic voicing of intervocalic sj in Old Tuscan. Old Tuscan displays both voiceless [ʃ] and voiced [ʒ] as outcomes of intervocalic sj, without an obvious phonological conditioning determining them. None of the existing attempts to account for this dual outcome – the search for a Neogrammarian regularity, the supposed introduction of [ʒ] through lexical borrowing, the hypothesis of a variable sound change – is completely satisfactory. It will be proposed that the hypothesis of a variable result of this sound change can be theoretically refined and given new empirical arguments. Specifically, it will be argued that an allophonic voicing rule may be followed by a partial lexical re-categorization of its output, and it will be shown that the outcome [ʒ] is most likely when the following vowel is low and/or stressed

The voiced and voiceless outcomes of intervocalic -SJ- in Old Tuscan

This paper deals with the non-systematic voicing of intervocalic sj in Old Tuscan. Old Tuscan displays both voiceless [ʃ] and voiced [ʒ] as outcomes of intervocalic sj, without an obvious phonological conditioning determining them. None of the existing attempts to account for this dual outcome – the search for a Neogrammarian regularity, the supposed introduction of [ʒ] through lexical borrowing, the hypothesis of a variable sound change – is completely satisfactory. It will be proposed that the hypothesis of a variable result of this sound change can be theoretically refined and given new empirical arguments. Specifically, it will be argued that an allophonic voicing rule may be followed by a partial lexical re-categorization of its output, and it will be shown that the outcome [ʒ] is most likely when the following vowel is low and/or stressed

List of Old Tuscan words with intervocalic stops

This document contains a list of Old Tuscan words having intervocalic stops in their Latin etymon; the list was obtained from a subset of the texts in the 'Opera del Vocabolario Italiano', and includes data about the lexical frequencies of voiceless and voiced outcomes of the stops