Markedness, context, and directionality in Turkish harmony: A corpus study on vowel co-occurrence patterns

Abstract

This paper reports results from a corpus study that examined static vowel cooccurrence patterns in Turkish. We show that roots are generally constrained by vowel harmony and that markedness alone, a notion that is at the heart of several previous analyses of Turkish vowel harmony, fails to account for vowel co-occurrence asymmetries and their probability. Furthermore, we identify significant interactions of both labial and palatal harmony with vowel height, the latter translating into a static subregularity with no apparent effect on the active vowel harmony process. In addition, we detect patterns that suggest non-local harmony effects, which does not find a straightforward explanation in most constraint-based accounts of harmony. Our data reveal that the structural description of vowel harmony constrains the shape of the non-initial vowels and that directionless harmony constraints do not accurately capture the autosegmental nature of the vowel harmony process in Turkish. Instead, we claim that harmony is parasitic on phonological representations, and must be viewed as a spreading process with a direction and context. We further argue that vowel harmony is active in (harmonic) roots and suggest an account of how such static regularities should be represented in the lexicon, and encoded as part of speakers’ phonological knowledge.