Konferans
30 Mayıs 2014 Cuma saat 19:30’da IFEA’da
Nicolas Royer-Artuso (dilbilimci, müzikolog)
In this talk, I will propose that Turkish Vowel Harmony (TVH) is no longer a phonological process of Turkish. TVH and, more importantly, the exceptions to it, have been a subject of intense discussions. Different models have been proposed but all of them are faced with disharmonic phenomena that are hard to handle coherently. This observation brings our attention to the sort of implications that should be drawn from the inexpediency between a more or less well understood concept and a mass of facts that are reluctant to get domesticated. In order to arrive at the conclusion that TVH is not or no longer a phonological process of Turkish, I first show some logical implications of the previous analyses of TVH. I start with the traditional account of TVH in order to present the facts that need to be handled by a model of TVH. Some alternative models of TVH (with an emphasis on Government Phonology) are then presented. I show some of the weaknesses of these proposals. The logical consequences of these proposals then bring me to present my theoretically agnostic conclusions, something that should pave the way to a more realistic analysis, compatible with different theoretic models of language description.