Vowel harmony and noun inflection in Caucasian Urum

(b)‘of his/her/its houses’at-lar-ın-ınhorse-PL-3.SG.POSS-GEN‘of his/her/its horses’Plural marking follows the rules indicated above. Given that the genitive suffixesfollowing the plural suffixes are always in the context of an unrounded triggering vowel,they are expected to be -ın, i.e. carrying the unroundet back high vowel /ı/ following theUrum pattern given in Table 4. Furthermore, word-final realization of the 3 rd personpossessive suffix is expected to be /i/ following the pattern given in Table 5. Bothexpectations are largely corroborated by the data in this part of the study; only a fewexceptions to this are attested. The patterns for the sequence ‘PL-GEN’ are given in (10).(10) Results: Production of plural and genitive -lAr-In(a) front, -roundit-ler-ın ‘dog-PL-GEN’, ev-ler-ın ‘house-PL-GEN’(b) front, +roundüzüg-ler-ın ‘ring-PL-GEN’, göl-ler-ın ‘lake-PL-GEN’(c) back, -roundġız-lar-ın ‘girl-PL-GEN’, at-lar-ın ‘horse-PL-GEN’(d) back, +rounddonguz-lar-ın ‘pig-PL-GEN’, yol-lar-ın ‘road-PL-GEN’The last suffix sequence to be reviewed is that of the 3 rd person possessive and thegenitive suffixes -(s)In-In. From Table 5 we know that in word final position the 3 rdperson possessive suffix is invariably /i/. As in standard Turkish, the third personpossessive suffix takes an /n/ if it is in non-final position. Thus, it displays the same shapeas the genitive suffix in the examples we tested (i.e. words with consonant-final roots).The first result of our elicitation study concerning the realization of the intendedsequence ‘3.SG.POSS-GEN’ is that – as is also usual in informal Turkish style – in a part ofthe data the speakers only realized the genitive suffix and left out the possessive marker