Turkish Vowel Harmony

Abstract

Turkish vowel harmony is a cover term for a set of well‐formedness conditions that dictate which vowels can co‐occur within what we will simply call a non‐compounded word, irrespective of its morphosyntactic complexity. This chapter aims to bring forth various issues surrounding the mechanism that realizes these vowel co‐occurrence conditions in Turkish, and discuss the ways in which they contribute to the understanding of the nature and dynamics of phonological representations and processes. We will explore Turkish vowel harmony in terms of three sets of issues, each of which has proved highly instructive for theory building and testing, and provoked decade‐long debates in the field of phonology. These are: (i) what is it that vowel harmony targets and what are the surface effects that it achieves?, (ii) how does it propagate in roots and suffixes?, and (iii) how can vowel harmony be obstructed, and what are the consequences of this for the nature of phonological representations? We will touch upon relevant theories and proposals in the literature in so far as they shed light on the interpretation of empirical facts, and also introduce new data and insights where necessary.

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