Dissertation - Michael Becker

To replicate the effect that place has over the distribution of voicing alternations, thelanguage learner must separately keep track of words that end in different stops. The factthat voicing affects stops of different places of articulation differently is well documented(e.g. Lisker & Abramson 1964; Ohala 1983; Volatis & Miller 1992). Additionally, thelenition of voiceless stops to voiced stops between vowels is also very well documented.Kirchner (1998) surveys numerous languages that lenite all of their voiceless stops betweenvowels, and several that lenite some of their voiceless stops, but his survey also haslanguages that lenite only labials (e.g. Gitksan, Hoard 1978), only coronals (e.g. LiverpoolEnglish, Wells 1982) or only dorsals (e.g. Apalai, Koehn & Koehn 1986). This typologycan not only motivate a general constraint against intervocalic stops, but also a family ofconstraints that penalize voiceless stops between vowels: *VpV, *VtV, *VÙV, *VkV. Theinteraction of each of these constraints with IDENT(voice) will allow the speaker to discoverthe proportion of the stop-final nouns of Turkish that alternate in each place of articulation.Note that for each place of articulation, the speaker has to keep track of both thenumber of words that alternate and the number of words that do not. Simply keeping acount of words that alternate leads to a wrong prediction: Compare, for instance, t-finalwords and Ù -final words. There are 214 t-final words that alternate, but only 117 Ù -finalwords that do. If the speaker were to only keep a count of alternating words, they wouldreach the conclusion that t-final words are more likely to alternate. But in fact, speakerschoose alternating responses with Ù -final words more often than they do with t-final words,reflecting the relative proportions of alternating and non-alternating nouns, not the absolutenumber of alternating nouns.Similarly, keeping track of just the non-alternating nouns will also make the wrongprediction. Comparing Ù -final words and k-final words, we see that there are more thantwice as many k-final non-alternators than there Ù -final non-alternators. Speakers, however,choose non-alternating responses with k-final words less often than they do with Ù -final48