Dissertation - Michael Becker

A closer examination of vowel rounding is no more revealing, and the details areomitted here for lack of interest. Other phonological properties that were checked andfound to be equally unrevealing are the voicing features of consonants earlier in the word,such as the closest consonant to the root-final stop, the closest onset consonant, and theclosest obstruent.To sum up the discussion so far, four phonological properties of Turkish nouns wereseen to correlate with stem-final voicing alternations in Turkish:• Size:mono-syllables alternate less than poly-syllables, and among the monosyllables,roots with simplex codas alternate more than roots with complex codas.• Place (of articulation): Stem-final coronals alternate the least, while labials anddorsals alternate the most.• Vowel height: stem-final stops are more likely to alternate following a high vowelcompared to a non-high vowel.• Vowel backness: stem-final stops are more likely to alternate following a back vowelcompared to a front vowel.All of these properties allow deeper insight when considered in pairs: Size and placehave a non-uniform interaction, with CVCC words behaving like CVC words when dorsalfinaland like CVCVC words when labial- or palatal-final. Height and backness interactwith place non-uniformly: the correlation with height is concentrated in the coronal-finalnouns, while the correlation with backness is concentrated in the palatal-final nouns.In statistical parlance, the aforementioned properties can be understood as predictors ina regression analysis. Since TELL makes a three-way distinction in stop-final nouns (nounsthat don’t alternate, nouns that do, and “vacillators”’, i.e. nouns that allow either alternationor non-alternation), an ordinal logistic regression model was fitted to the lexicon using thelrm() function in R (R Development Core Team 2007). The dependent variable was a three-28