Turkish Intonation from a Pitch Accent Language Perspective Beste Kamali Universit¨at Potsdam & Harvard university 14.12.2010 1 Overview • Problem: Turkish has been argued to be a pitch accent language (Levi 2005), but this has not been incorporated into the few existing intonational analyses ( ¨ Ozge 2003, Kan 2009) • New elicitations with sonorant near minimal pairs were done. • An analysis of the phrasing is presented, whereby: – The accentless class is taken to be truly accentless in focus-neutral contexts – Main prominence lies in a conspiracy between recursive phrases, rightward tone spreading, and optional tonal dissimilation. 2 Background on Turkish accent system • Final stress/accent ∼ regular stress/accent kit´ ap ‘book’ Non-final stress/accent ∼ exceptional stress/accent ∼ lexical accent p´asta ‘cake’ • Regularly stressed roots transfer stress under suffixation. A large class of nominal and verbal suffixes do not disturb final stress, therefore bear word stress when they are at the right edge (1a). Further suffixation does not disturb accent placement in lexically accented words (1b) (Sezer 1981, Inkelas and Orgun 1998, Kabak and Vogel 2001, Inkelas and Orgun 2003). This property, termed ‘culminativity’, is a common characteristic of pitch accent languages (Levi 2005) (1) a. kitap-lık-lar-ımız-d´ a book-der-pl-poss1pl-loc ‘on our bookshelves’ b. p´ asta-cı-lar-ımız-da cake-der-pl-poss1sg-loc ‘among our cake chefs’ • A monosyllabic root (or affix for that matter) never has non-final word stress. I.e. there is no mono- syllabic root that behaves like p´asta in (1b) (Kaisse 1985, Barker 1989). “An underlying trochaic foot is required for exceptional accent” (Inkelas 1999). (2) *C ´ VC-lar-ımız-da CVC-pl-poss1sg-loc 1