Dissertation - Michael Becker

of the final stop, but they do not use the quality of the vowel that precedes the wordfinalstop.A back vowel before a word-final [Ù], for instance, correlates with morealternations, but Turkish speakers ignore this correlation in their treatment of novel nouns.This language-specific behavior can be understood from a cross-linguistic perspective:Typological observations commonly correlate the distribution of voice with a word’s sizeand a consonant’s place of articulation, but rarely or never with the quality of a neighboringvowel. Indeed, speakers are reluctant to learn patterns that correlate vowel height with thevoicing of a neighboring consonant (Moreton 2008, see also Moreton & Thomas 2007).From a cross-linguistic perspective, it is unsurprising that mono-syllabic nouns wouldbehave differently from poly-syllabic nouns with respect to the voicing alternation. Initialsyllables are often protected from markedness pressures, showing a wider range of contrastsand an immunity to alternations (Beckman 1998). Specifically in Turkish, the privilegedstatus of the feature [voice] in initial syllables is not only seen in voicing alternations.Generally in the language, a coda stop followed by an onset stop will surface with thevoicing feature of the onset stop (e.g. is.tib.dat ‘despotism’, *is.tip.dat), but a coda stop inthe initial syllable may disagree in voice with the following onset (e.g. mak.bul ‘accepted’,eb.kem ‘mute’).The backness of a neighboring vowel, however, is never seen to interact with aconsonant’s voicing.While such a connection is mildly phonetically plausible (vowelbackness correlates with tongue-root position, which in turn correlates with voicing), thereis no known report of any language where consonant voicing changes depending on thebackness of a neighboring vowel, or vice versa. Given this gap in the universal inventory ofpossible phonological interactions, it is no longer surprising that in Turkish, speakers showno sign of using vowel backness as a predictor of voicing alternations.In Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004), typological observations areencoded in the structure of the universal inventory of constraints (CON). The constraintsare crafted such that their interactions produce all and only the observed sound patterns20