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Morphological Complexity within and across Boundaries: In honour of Aslı Göksel
Edited by Aslı Gürer, Dilek Uygun-Gökmen and Balkız Öztürk
[Studies in Language Companion Series 215] 2020
► pp. 191–210

Paradigm leveling and regularization derive variation in stress

A corpus study on Turkish non-final stress at the morphology-phonology interface

| University of Würzburg
| University of Würzburg

Based on corpus data from spoken Turkish, we investigate variation in two types of exceptional stress-deriving suffixes. In the case of the person markers of the z-paradigm, all of which but the 3rd person plural marker -lEr are generally analyzed as unstressable, we find that -lEr exhibits variable stress behavior, either being regularly stressable or behaving as an unstressable suffix. On the other hand, we see that -Iyor, a fixed-stress suffix, is on the verge of becoming regularly stressable. We argue that these developments derive from different mechanisms, particularly paradigm leveling and the loss of fixed stress due to regularization, /r/-dropping being one of the segmental concomitants of the latter. The diachronic development of these suffixes further supports our findings.

Keywords: stress variation, paradigm leveling, lexical stress, regularization
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Regular vs. exceptional stress assignment and stress variability in Turkish
  • 3.Corpus study
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.215.07kab
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