Limits of prosody in Turkish

Abstract

This paper claims that certain syntactic structures and information structural content are not always directly encoded in the prosodic representation of Turkish utterances. That syntax is mirrored rather limitedly in prosody is observed in isolated parentheticals which are prosodically realized identically to syntactically integrated constituents such as subjects and objects. That information structure has a limited effect on F0 variation is evidenced in utterances containing multiple foci; they display the same F0 pattern as allnew utterances or utterances with narrow focus. Thus, neither the informative status (topic/focus/neutral) nor the syntactic status (sentential/extra-sentential) of a constituent licenses a pre-specified phonetic correlate for focus and topic in Turkish. To explain the relationship between information structure and prosody in Turkish, one requires an account that appeals to the alignment of relevant items to certain prosodic positions at the level of the Phonological Phrase. In this article, general characteristics of the prosodic units within a Turkish Intonation Phrase are described. An information structure-free inventory of a Turkish Intonation Phrase is developed. This study concludes that what intonation languages such as English and German convey with pitch-accent placement is conveyed through prosodic phrasing strategies and boundary tone placement in Turkish, which is a characteristic of ‘phrase languages’.