Hidden boundaries in modern Turkish; evidence from vowel raising in uighur and Turkish

Abstract

In an agglutinative language like Turkish or Uighur, we expect to find many words made up of a stem plus one or more suffixes. Where the “join” occurs is not necessarily obvious as many boundaries blur over time. Some remain visible, such as those which produce a sequence of consonants, e.g. Turkish gençler “young people” where nç followed by l would not usually occur in a morphologically simplex word. Other joins, especially those involving a stemfinal or suffix-initial vowel, can be harder to identify. In this paper it is proposed that a forgotten parsing cue may remain in certain modern Turkish compounds. Turkish and Uighur have several devices which signal boundaries. For example, vowel harmony binds many suffixes to the preceding stem, and stress is typically word-final. Disharmony and non-final stress are often signals for internal morphology. Uighur has another device which signals word-building: the last low vowel of a word is raised before a following suffix, provided that no more than one consonant separates the last vowel of the stem from the first vowel of the suffix. The alternation can be used as evidence to show whether a word-internal vowel belongs to the stem or to the following suffix. Looking at Turkish vowel raising in the context of y (Kumbaracı, 1966), it is proposed that a similar phenomenon can demonstrate where a verb stem ends. Specifically, looking at the present continuous -ı/i/u/ü/yor and potential -abil/-ebil, it is suggested that stress and disharmony signal the end of the first part of the compound, i.e. root plus adverbial suffix -a/e. In the case of the present continuous, the initial consonant of -yor triggers raising of the preceding vowel.