Turkish Emphatic Reduplication
Andrew B Wedel · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 1999
Turkish Emphatic Reduplication Andrew Wedel University of California, Santa Cruz [email protected] 1 Introduction Emphatic variants of some Turkish adjectives are historically derived by prefixing a CVC syllable in which the initial CV are identical to the word-initial CV of the base of affixation, while the final C is taken from the set {p, s, m, r}, as illustrated in (1):’ 1 . (a) (b) (c) (d) Turkish emphatic adjectives base gloss emphatic form gloss kara belli bejaz temiz 'dark' 'clear' 'white' 'clean' kapkara besbelli bembejaz tertemiz 'pitch black' 'obvious' 'bright white' 'spotless' Cross-linguistically, derivational processes often make use of phonological material already present in a base word; in such reduplicative processes a copy of the base word is affixed to the base word itself. This copy can be complete or partial, perfect or imperfect, as required by constraints on prosody or phonological well-formedness. A number of accounts within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993) have been proposed in which the initial CV of Turkish emphatic prefixes is analyzed as a copy of the word-initial CV (Kelepir 1999, Yu 1998, 1999). Within these accounts, the identity of the prefix-initial CV to the initial CV of the base is formally enforced through high-ranking constraints on base-reduplicant identity, following work of McCarthy & Prince (1995), among many others. The source of the consonant interpolated between the reduplicant and the base is less clear however; some previous work has suggested that this consonant is simply lexically encoded (Yavas, 1980, Vaux, 1998) while more recent accounts have claimed that a sufficiently clear relationship exists between the distribution of final prefix consonant and phonological material in the base to warrant a phonological explanation (Kelepir 1999, Yu, Previous attempts to rationalize the pattern of final prefixal consonant distribution have focused on featural OCP (obligatory countour principle, Leben 1973) effects, claiming that the choice of final prefixal consonant operates to minimize featural similarity with any consonant in the base, with particular emphasis on any similarity with both the initial 1 The emphatic prefix is underlined in all forms given. A near exhaustive list of attested reduplicated forms is provided in Appendix 1.