This paper looks at the case of so-called neutral roots in Uyghur (Turkic: China), whose idiosyncratic behavior with respect to the backness harmony system has been analyzed as stemming from a covert vowel contrast. Based on considerations of the structural properties of the language and the results of an experimental study, we suggest that an analysis based on lexical exceptionality is more parsimonious than the traditional analysis, unifying the treatment of neutral roots with other cases of exceptionality in the harmony system and accounting for a relationship between the patterning of roots and their frequency. We close by discussing implications for covert contrast analyses in general.
In this paper we present a preliminary intonational model for Uyghur (Turkic: China). We use acoustic measurements to support the claim that Uyghur is a stress language that only uses edge-marking intonation. Although this is not unattested in the literature, to our knowledge this is the first AM model of such a language.
This paper argues that the Turkic auxiliary construction -(İ)p bol-, at least in Uyghur andUzbek, is actually a pair of auxiliaries with distinct meanings. The first auxiliary is described as expressing "full completion" of the event, but its use is highly restricted, to events with incremental or universally quantified themes. Using targeted context-based elicitation, we find that the expression of completion is indirect. Instead, the auxiliary asserts that the event description is homomorphic, in that all of its events are both event-mapped and theme-mapped. Homomorphism requires every part of the theme to undergo a part of the event, and this derives the reported sense of completion.The second auxiliary is not attested in the literature. It applies to all kinds of events, and expresses what we call "content satisfaction," the conventional implicature that the event as described satisfies some salient propositional content by rendering it true. For instance, it makes part of a plan come to fruition. This plan is presupposed, and the content is accessible through a content-generating function.We apply the methodologies of formal semantic fieldwork to tease these auxiliaries apart, including scope tests that apply differently to the two auxiliaries. Having distinguished them, we suggest new ways to typologically distinguish Turkic auxiliaries and auxiliaries cross-linguistically.
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