Öner Özçelik

Prosodic faithfulness to foot edges: the case of Turkish stress *

This paper presents a novel approach to capturing exceptional stress that relies on prespecification of foot edges in the input. Focusing on Turkish, this approach accounts for both regular and exceptional stress in a unified manner and within a single grammar, and unlike other approaches, does not overpredict. On this account, Turkish is a footless, but trochaic, language. Both regular and exceptional Turkish morphemes are subject to the same constraint ranking; exceptional morphemes are different only in that they have one or more syllables already footed in the input, although the type of foot (e.g. trochaicity, binarity) is determined by the constraints of the grammar. As regular morphemes vacuously satisfy these constraints (which act on the foot), trochees appear on the surface only if there is an input foot available (i.e. in words with exceptional morphemes), since the grammar itself has no apparatus to parse syllables into feet.

The Foot is not an obligatory constituent of the Prosodic Hierarchy: “stress” in Turkish, French and child English

Abstract This paper proposes that the presence/absence of the Foot is parametric; that is, contra much previous research (see e. g. Selkirk, Elisabeth (1995). Sentence prosody: intonation, stress and phrasing. In J. Goldsmith (ed.) The handbook of phonological theory. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. 550–569., Vogel, Irene (2009). Universals of prosodic structure. In S. Scalise, E. Magni, & A. Bisetto (eds.) Universals of language today. Dordrecht: Springer. 59–82.), it is argued here that the Foot is not a universal constituent of the Prosodic Hierarchy; rather, some languages, such as Turkish and French, as well as early child languages, are footless. Several types of evidence are presented in support of this proposal, from both Turkish and French, as well as child English. A comparison of regular (word-final) and exceptional stress in Turkish reveals, for example, that regular “stress” is intonational prominence falling on the last syllable of prosodic words in the absence of foot structure. Both acoustic and formal evidence are presented in support of this proposal, as well as evidence from syntax-prosody interface. The paper also presents evidence for the footless status of French, which, unlike Turkish, is proposed to be completely footless. Several arguments are presented in support of this position, such as the fact that, in French, the domain of obligatory prominence is the Phonological Phrase (PPh), not the Prosodic Word (PWd); in a PPh consisting of several PWds, therefore, nonfinal PWds can surface without any kind of stress or prominence, suggesting that, at least for non-final PWds, one cannot assume stress or foot structure. Finally, the proposal is extended to additional languages, such as those demonstrating Default-to-Opposite Edge stress.

Against Isomorphism and the Maxim of Charity in child language acquisition: Implications for the validity of the TVJT methodology

Abstract This paper investigates children’s interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences containing negation and quantification, such as Donald didn’t find two guys, and Two horses didn’t jump over the fence. It has been argued, in previous literature, that children interpret such sentences only on their surface scope reading, i. e., on the interpretation ‘It’s not the case that Donald found two guys,’ instead of the adult-preferred inverse scope interpretation ‘There are two guys that Donald didn’t find,’ a phenomenon often called the Observation of Isomorphism. The present study shows, however, that this argument, even in its weakest interpretation, does not hold true, and that the apparent Isomorphism effect is an artifact of the experimental procedures used in previous studies. It also shows, based on Relevance Theory, and drawing from a series of novel experiments with 5-year-olds, that the reason why children seemed, in previous studies, to favor surface scope interpretations was because they made their decisions based on the set or information that they viewed as most “relevant” in a given context. It is concluded that children differ from adults not in scopal options their grammar allows, but in that they rank “salience” higher as a cue for general “relevance” than the Maxim of Charity, though for adults, the Maxim of Charity is at least equally relevant.

Universal Grammar and second language phonology: Full Transfer / Prevalent Access in the L2 Acquisition of Turkish “Stress” by English and French Speakers

ABSTRACT This article explores the role of transfer and Universal Grammar (UG) in second language (L2) phonology by investigating the L2 acquisition of stress/prominence in footless languages, such as Turkish and French, which have fixed word- and phrase-final prominence respectively. It is proposed that once the prosodic constituent Foot is projected in a footed first language (L1), such as English, it is impossible to expunge it from the grammar in learning a footless L2. Learners in this condition will, instead, be restricted to resetting parameters that act on the Foot (e.g. trochaic/iambic, iterative/non-iterative, weight-sensitive/weight-insensitive). In order to investigate these predictions, a semi-controlled production experiment was conducted with English- and French-speaking learners of L2 Turkish, of various proficiency levels. The results largely confirm our predictions. None of the English-speaking subjects were able to rid their grammar of the Foot. They were, however, able to make various UG-constrained changes to their grammar, such as resetting Extrametricality from Yes to No, and later, Foot-Type from Trochaic to Iambic, thereby having increasingly more word types with word-final (but footed) stress. French-speaking learners, on the other hand, produced target-like footless outputs from the beginning, with word-final prominence. The findings provide strong evidence for UG-based theories of L2 acquisition: (i) interlanguage grammars, even when non-targetlike, are ‘possible’ grammars, paralleling other natural languages, (ii) options ruled out by UG, such as weight-insensitive iambs, are not employed, despite such a stage being cognitively most reasonable, and (iii) grammar change is brought along on a parameter-by-parameter basis, instead of being reflective of frequency.

Interface Hypothesis and the L2 Acquisition of Quantificational Scope at the Syntax-Semantics-Pragmatics Interface.

ABSTRACT According to the Interface Hypothesis (IH) (e.g., Tsimpli & Sorace 2006; Sorace 2011), external interfaces are more challenging for L2 learners than internal interfaces. It is not clear, however, if linguistic phenomena associated with external interfaces are necessarily problematic and if internal interfaces are necessarily unproblematic. In order to test these issues, a bidirectional study was conducted with Turkish-speaking learners of English and English-speaking learners of Turkish on the same “quantificational scope” construction, which lies at the interface of semantics, syntax, and pragmatics and thus involves both internal and external interfaces. The task for the former group implicates greater involvement of pragmatics, an external interface, although, for the latter, it involves expunging a construction from the grammar. The results indicate, contra the IH, that whereas the former group has no problems restructuring their grammar, the latter has persistent difficulties.

Emergent knowledge of a universal phonological principle in the L2 acquisition of vowel harmony in Turkish: A ‘four’-fold poverty of the stimulus in L2 acquisition:

A significant body of theoretically motivated research has addressed the role of Universal Grammar (UG) in the nonnative acquisition of morphosyntax and properties of the syntax–semantics interface, but very little research has addressed the role of phonological principles of UG in nonnative language acquisition. Turkish has a regular and pervasive system of vowel harmony for which classroom second language (L2) learners receive explicit instruction and abundant input; however, there are also cases of non-canonical vowel harmony in Turkish, for which classroom learners receive no instruction and rather little input. In this study, we show that English–Turkish L2ers come to exhibit sensitivity to the ‘No Crossing Constraint’ of UG (Goldsmith, 1976; Hammond, 1988) when calculating non-canonical vowel harmony in the context of underlyingly pre-specified non-velarized laterals (i.e. ‘light’ [l]), despite the poverty of the stimulus and potentially misleading effects of classroom instruction and standard Turkish orthography. We argue that this supports the view that nonnative phonological development is guided by (at least one principle of) UG.