Prosodic faithfulness to foot edges: the case of Turkish stress

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to capturing exceptional stress that relies on prespecification of foot edges in the input. Focusing on Turkish, this approach accounts for both regular and exceptional stress in a unified manner and within a single grammar, and unlike other approaches, does not overpredict. On this account, Turkish is a footless, but trochaic, language. Both regular and exceptional Turkish morphemes are subject to the same constraint ranking ; exceptional morphemes are different only in that they have one or more syllables already footed in the input, although the type of foot (e.g. trochaicity, binarity) is determined by the constraints of the grammar. As regular morphemes vacuously satisfy these constraints (which act on the foot), trochees appear on the surface only if there is an input foot available (i.e. in words with exceptional morphemes), since the grammar itself has no apparatus to parse syllables into feet.I would like to express my deepest thanks to Heather Goad, Glyne Piggott, Michael Wagner, Lydia White and the audience at NELS 40 for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Heather Goad, in particular, has provided many ideas, support and guidance for this project, for which I am extremely grateful. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers of Phonology, as well as the associate editor, for their helpful comments and suggestions. *

Phrase-level Prosodic Smothering in Makonde

“…In contrast, 2φ-modifiers have no subcategorization frame and therefore receive default prosodification. One alternative which BHH (p.213-216) explicitly argue against is pre-specification approach (Idsardi 1992, Halle & Idsardi 1995, Özçelik 2014. Under this approach, the phonological structure and subcategorization frame are merged and both form part of the underlying representation of the morpheme, 7 i.e.…”

L2 Acquisition of a Complex Stress Pattern: UG-Constrained Learning Paths in Khalkha Mongolian

“…These problems, however, go away if initial (leftmost) stress in DOE stress languages like Khalkha is assumed to be intonational prominence, as with Gordon (2000 , 2014) and Özçelik (2014 , 2017) , one that does not involve foot structure. This would mean that End-Rule is consistently set to Right in Mongolian (with final foot extrametricality), and End-Rule- Right is vacuously satisfied for cases with initial stress, as there is no foot available.…”

“…In order to see the challenges this learning scenario potentially poses for the learner in the absence of access to a domain-specific knowledge about the structural possibilities natural languages offer, consider the following: On the surface, it looks like Mongolian is a Trochaic and Weight-Sensitive language, but a strange one in that End-Rule, the parameter that determines the location of main stress, appears to be sometimes set to Left (2a, b), sometimes to Right (3a, b, d), and sometimes even to Middle (2c, d, f), and sometimes replaced by Leftmost-Wins (4c), a system that is linguistically impossible [more on this in (7) and (8) below], and crucially one that is, thus, ruled out by UG. If, however, these systems are considered to be prominence-driven, and independent of foot structure ( Walker, 1997 ), or if the default (left edge) ‘stress’ at least were to be considered ‘intonational prominence’ instead of stress (e.g., Gordon, 2000 ; Özçelik, 2017 ), such systems would find a more viable explanation, especially since the Foot is no longer considered to be a universal, i.e., not every prosodic word needs to be headed by at least one foot (e.g., Özçelik, 2011 , 2014 , 2017 ; Garcia and Goad, 2021 ).…”

The Prosodic Acquisition Path Hypothesis: Towards explaining variability in L2 acquisition of phonology

“…Unlike English, the accentual system of Turkish is rather simple (at least on the surface); word-level accent in Turkish falls on the last syllable of prosodic words (e.g. Lees 1961;Lewis 1967;Underhill 1976;Sezer 1983;van der Hulst & van de Weijer 1991;Hayes 1995;Kornfilt 1997;Inkelas & Orgun 1998;Inkelas 1999;Kabak & Vogel 2001;Özçelik 2014;to appear). This is demonstrated in (16) below; notice that irrespective of the rhymal profile of the syllables involved (i.e.…”

“…When accent is non-final in Turkish, it is commonly referred to as 'exceptional stress' (see e.g. Kaisse 1985;van der Hulst & van de Weijer 1991;Inkelas & Orgun 1995;Kabak & Vogel 2001;Özçelik 2014;to appear). Exceptional stress can involve either roots, as in (19) (which are mostly borrowed words or place names, Sezer 1983;Kornfilt 1997), or some affixes, as demonstrated in (20), most of which are pre-stressing ((20a/b)), with some bisyllabic suffixes which are stressed on their first syllable ((20c)):…”