Dissertation - Michael Becker

The grammar in (59) allows the speaker to partition their Ù -final nouns by their monoorpoly-syllabicity, and within each length, by the complexity of their coda. Within each ofthe four kinds of Ù -final nouns, alternators are separated from non-alternators, giving thespeaker access to the relative proportion of alternating nouns in each partition. The stimuliwith complex codas that were used in the experiment in §2.3 were all mono-syllabic, andfor those nouns, speakers successfully replicated the proportion of alternators from thelexicon.Poly-syllabic nouns with complex codas were not treated separately in the statisticalanalyses in §2.2 due to their small number relative to the poly-syllabic nouns with simplecodas. Of the 301 mono-syllabic nouns in TELL, the 164 nouns that have a complex codamake a respectable 54.5%. However, the 190 poly-syllabic nouns with a complex codamake a mere 7% of the 2701 poly-syllabic nouns in TELL. Consequently, poly-syllabicnouns with complex codas are not very representative of the Turkish lexicon as a whole,nor are they representative of the poly-syllabic nouns of Turkish, and therefore they werenot tested in the experiment in §2.3. They are included in the analysis here for the sake ofcompleteness only.2.4.6 Voicing alternations and k∼∅ alternationsThe discussion of voicing alternations in §2.2 and §2.3 abstracted away from the factthat post-vocalic dorsals delete, rather than become voiced. The crucial observation in thiscontext is that the voicing of stem-final stops and the deletion of stem-final dorsals are incomplementary distribution. This is seen in (60) below, where post-vocalic dorsals eithersurface faithfully in the possessive (a-b) or delete (c-d), whereas post-consonantal dorsalseither surface faithfully (e-f) or voice (g-h).61