5 - Exceptional stress-attracting suffixes in Turkish: representations versus the grammar

Summary

Introduction

Generative phonology has wrestled since its inception with the question of whether, for some given phenomenon, that phenomenon should be handled with rules or constraints – i.e., in the grammar – or with prespecified representations – i.e., in the lexicon. The introduction by Prince and Smolensky (1993) of Optimality Theory provides a fresh outlook on this old question. By fundamentally changing the nature of grammar, Optimality Theory may change the answer to any given question of this kind.

The specific question to be addressed in this chapter, from the viewpoint of Optimality Theory, is how to handle exceptional patterns in Turkish stress: in the lexicon, with underlying templatic metrical structure, or in the grammar, through morpheme-specific constraints? The question is of particular interest because of work by McCarthy and Prince (1993b) which challenges one of the strongest arguments in favor of underlying metrical structure in phonological theory.

Doing without templates in Optimality Theory

Since McCarthy and Prince (1986), reduplication has been a major source of evidence for the existence of underlying metrical structure, or templates, in lexical entries. In “classical” reduplication, the phonological representation of a reduplicative morpheme consists virtually entirely of metrical structure (usually a syllable or a foot). However, McCarthy and Prince (1993b, this volume) have argued that Optimality Theory makes templates unnecessary even in the analyses of the very phenomena that originally motivated their existence.

The essential idea is that in Optimality Theory, the work of a template can be taken over by a grammatical constraint determining the type of metrical structure to which a morpheme corresponds in the output.