Kaun 1999 Full Movie

[Arleen Smelko]

Toprovide an example, epenthesis of a high vowel occurs in Turkish to repair illegal consonant clusters in codas. These illegal clusters have rising or flat sonority, and occur in Arabic loanwords (Clements & Sezer, 1982). The inserted high vowel (in italics in [1]) appears in the bare form of the word, or when the root is followed by a consonant-initial suffix. It is absent when the consonant cluster is followed by a vowel-initial suffix, such as in the accusative case.

Intrusive vowels contrast with lexical and epenthetic vowels phonologically, gesturally, and acoustically. Phonologically, intrusive vowels have no corresponding segment, so they cannot participate in phonological processes that target segments, such as vowel harmony and syllabification. Because intrusion does not result in a new vocalic segment, it does not alter syllable structure, and cannot be taken as repair of illegal syllable structures. When vowel intrusion occurs between two consonants, the two consonant gestures are still coordinated with each other. For instance, if vowel epenthesis occurs in complex codas, the maximal syllable for the language might be CVC. But if vowel intrusion occurs, then the two final consonants are still part of the same syllable, and in some sense CVCC syllables are permitted. Finally, since intrusive vowels do not form syllable nuclei, they also cannot be targets for stress assignment.

In contrast, when intrusion occurs, no segment is inserted in phonology, and no gesture is added in articulation, but the relative timing of the /C/ and /r/ gestures produces the percept of an intervening vowel (Figure 2). This can sound schwa-like when /V/ overlaps less with the interconsonantal interval (Figure 2a), or sound like a copy of the following /V/ when the /V/ gesture overlaps more (Figure 2b). Intermediate or more extreme alignments are also possible.

Experiments have exploited these articulatory differences to distinguish intrusive and epenthetic inserted vowels. For example, the intrusive schwas that break up illegal onset clusters like /zg/ in English are gesturally closer to /sk/ than to /sək/ (Davidson & Stone, 2003), indicating that the acoustic schwa lacks its own gesture. In contrast, inserted schwas in Dutch, argued by Hall (2003) to be intrusive, have gestural consequences similar to lexical schwa, suggesting that they are epenthetic instead (Warner, Jongman, Cutler, & Mcke, 2002).

Cross-linguistically, intrusive vowels typically occur across sonorants, share the quality of the vowel that is adjacent across the sonorant, do not contribute a syllable, and are sensitive to speech rate (Hall, 2003; see also Fleischhacker, 2005). These properties characterize complex onset repair in Turkish, in which an underlying consonant cluster optionally surfaces with an acoustic vowel breaking it up, as in (2). The hypothesized intrusive vowels are transcribed between .

The onset-repairing vowels in these examples are invited by a stop+liquid cluster, and their quality is affected by the vowels that are adjacent over the liquid. Onset-repairing vowels can be absent in careful speech (Clements & Sezer, 1982), and are rarely written down. These characteristics suggest that the onset-repairing vowel may be intrusive, an acoustic consequence of the open transition between consonant gestures.

However, previous treatments of Turkish complex onset repair characterize it as the mirror image of complex coda repair. Both non-lexical vowels are described as epenthetic and harmonizing with the neighboring vowel (Yavaş, 1980; Clements & Sezer, 1982; Kaun, 1999; Yıldız, 2010). But where the coda-repairing vowel is obligatorily present in careful speech, casual speech, and in writing, the onset-repairing vowel is only optionally present in both speech and writing. Moreover, where the coda-repairing vowel participates obligatorily in vowel harmony, the onset-repairing vowel reportedly participates in a variable, consonant-dependent fashion (Clements & Sezer, 1982). These differences are explained if onset repair is vowel intrusion, while coda repair is epenthesis.

This paper presents an acoustic production experiment on Turkish onset cluster repair. The results support the hypothesis that vowels in Turkish onset clusters are intrusive, not epenthetic. The duration of the interconsonantal interval (ICI) in Turkish onset clusters is found to have a unimodal distribution, suggesting that the acoustic insertion is a gradient phenomenon, not an optional, categorical process. Moreover, acoustic non-lexical vowels are found to be shorter and more affected by co-articulation with the following vowel than their underlying counterparts. Finally, the formant values of the acoustic inserted vowels in this experiment were generally similar to those of [ɯ], even when vowel harmony would demand [i] or [u]. These results support an interpretation of Turkish onset repair as a gradient gestural phenomenon, in which the release of the initial consonant in the cluster contributes a schwa-like acoustic vowel.

This study contributes in three areas. First, it provides new, controlled Turkish data, by collecting repeated productions by multiple speakers of methodically chosen near minimal sets of words. Second, it probes the phonological status of the Turkish onset-repairing vowel, thereby testing the validity of phonological arguments that have been made on the basis of its behavior. Onset cluster repair is significant for our understanding of both syllable structure and vowel harmony in Turkish. If onset repair is not phonological, then traditional characterization of Turkish syllable structure as maximally CVC(C) needs to be revised, at least for loanwords. In addition, onset cluster repair provides the only counter-evidence to the traditional claim that harmony in Turkish is strictly left to right. If onset repair actually occurs outside of categorical phonology, then it is not actually relevant to harmony. Finally, this study expands the knowledge-base for vowel intrusion by supplying phonetic detail about intrusive vowels that are unusual because they occur in onset clusters (rather than coda clusters), and in a language with vowel harmony.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 summarizes previous work on onset cluster repair in Turkish. The design of an acoustic production study is presented in Section 3, and its results in Section 4. Section 5 discusses and concludes.

Experimental data on Turkish onset cluster repair comes from Yavaş (1980), Kaun (1999), and Bokhari, Durmaz, and Washington (2016). In a reading task (Yavaş, 1980), nonce words that began with consonant-consonant sequences were consistently produced with inserted vowels whose backness reflected the features of the following lexical vowel. Only two of the target words began with obstruent+sonorant clusters, and these two were the source of the only inter-speaker variability in the study. In addition, high round vowels triggered rounding of the inserted vowel, but /o/ did not. Following up on this result, Kaun (1999) presented nine subjects with a list of 109 loanwords beginning with consonant clusters, and asked them what vowel they would say them with. All inserted vowels were high vowels that matched the backness of the following lexical vowel. When the following lexical vowel was [+high, +round], inserted vowels were also consistently round.1 However, rounding varied between and among speakers when the trigger was low, which was interpreted as a height-agreement effect (Kaun, 1999). Finally, Bokhari et al. (2016) provide the only acoustic study of vowel insertion in Turkish to date. Their production study with four speakers found that coda-repairing vowels did not differ significantly from underlying vowels, while onset-repairing vowels (coded as ) had a shorter duration, lower F2, and sometimes a higher F1 than underlying /i/.

To supplement these studies, I conducted a corpus study in the Turkish Electronic Living Lexicon (TELL; Inkelas, Kntay, Sprouse & Orghun, 2000). TELL consists of phonemic transcriptions of 17,500 Turkish lexemes produced by two native speakers of Istanbul Turkish. The data was collected by having these two speakers read through a dictionary and a list of place names, producing each lexeme in a variety of morphological contexts. Of the 415 tokens of word-initial onset clusters in TELL, 70% are transcribed with an inserted vowel. Looking specifically at stop+rhotic clusters, which will be the focus of the production experiment described below, Speaker 1 has 189 input /Cr/ words, of which 135 are transcribed with vowel insertion (71.4% transcribed insertion rate among /Cr/-initial words). The Turkish rhotic, transcribed as /r/ in this paper, is typically realized as an alveolar tap (Gksel & Kerslake, 2005: 9; Lewis, 1967: 7).

To address the lack of data on acoustic detail, intraspeaker variation, and the effect of the surrounding context on onset cluster repair in Turkish, I conducted a production study. The experiment is designed to: (1) establish whether apparent insertion in Turkish is a gradient or a categorical process, by examining the duration of the interval between C and /r/; (2) determine the rate of acoustic insertion in onset clusters and the degree to which frontness or rounding spreads to the inserted vowel; (3) look for acoustic differences between lexical and non-lexical vowels. The experiment had a 2 by 3 by 3 by 2 design. The primary factor manipulated was the underlying syllable structure of the target word: beginning with a stop+/r/ onset cluster (/Cr/), or beginning with a simple onset followed by an underlying vowel and /r/ (/Cvr/). The /Cvr/ words were included as controls so that non-lexical vowels in /Cr/ words could be compared to lexical vowels. Although vowel insertion is also reported to occur in other clusters (including /s/+stop, obstruent+/l/), /Cr/ clusters were chosen for the experiment because insertion is transcribed at a higher rate in /Cr/ clusters (71% in TELL) than in /sC/ clusters (42% in TELL). In addition, surface harmonic effects resulting from vowel overlap are more likely to occur across a sonorant like Turkish /r/ (phonetically a tap) than across a stop (Hall, 2003, 2006).

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