Turkish stress: Implications for formal phonology and second language acquisition Friday, 25 November 2022 11:00-12:30
Öner Özçelik
Indiana University, Bloomington
Öner Özçelik is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University, the world's leading center of academic expertise on the vast heartland of Europe and Asia extending from Northern Europe to East Asia and from the Baltic Sea and Siberia to Anatolia, the Persian Gulf and the Himalayas. He also serves as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Second Language Studies and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Linguistics in the same institution. Until recently, he also served, for a decade, as the Director of the Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region, one of the 16 National Language Resource Centers funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the only one focusing on Central and Western Asian Languages, conducting pedagogical research and creating language teaching materials (e.g. textbooks). He has a Ph.D. in Linguistics & Second Language Acquisition from McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and an MA in Applied Linguistics, with a TESOL Certificate, from the University of Pittsburgh, PA, as well as a BA in Foreign Language Education from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. He has taught courses and published research on formal phonology, as well as on linguistics in general and second language acquisition/teaching, especially with respect to the less commonly taught languages of Central Eurasia.
Abstract
Turkish stress: Implications for formal phonology and second language acquisition
This paper investigates Turkish word-level stress and has both a formal phonological and second language (L2) acquisition component. I first demonstrate, along with Özçelik (2009, 2014, 2017, in press), and contra much previous research (e.g. Nespor & Vogel 1986, Vogel 2009), that the presence/absence of the Foot is parametric; that is, whereas some languages, such as English, require every prosodic word to have at least one foot, other languages, such as Turkish, are footless in the default case, and thus stressless. I also offer a unique way of addressing lexical stress, which is based on foot edge pre-specification and wholly satisfies the Richness of the Base (Prince & Smolensky, 1993), thereby avoiding stipulations that have thus far been typical of previous approaches to lexical stress/phonological exceptions. After having established how word-level prosody is represented in Turkish, the paper moves on to investigate the L2 acquisition of stress/prominence in the language. I propose, along with my previous research (e.g. Özçelik 2016, 2018) that once the Foot is projected in a first language (L1), it is extremely hard to expunge it from the grammar in learning a footless L2, such as Turkish. 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-speaking learners of L2 Turkish, of various proficiency levels. The results largely confirm our predictions. Learners of Turkish were not able to rid their grammar of the Foot; greater duration and/or intensity, correlates of foot-based stress, accompanied word-level prominence in their productions. They were, however, able to make 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 stress.
The findings provide strong evidence for UG-based theories of L2 acquisition (e.g. White 1989, 2003). First, the interlanguage grammars of the English-speaking subjects at each stage of the path are possible grammars constrained by UG, although they are neither like the L1 nor the L2. Second, certain stages/interlanguage grammars, such as a weight-insensitive iambic system, did not emerge in the productions of the English-speaking subjects, despite being pedagogically/cognitively reasonable, as this is not permitted by UG (e.g. Hayes 1995, McCarthy & Prince 1986). Third, the phonetic cues for stress, for the English-speaking subjects with both trochaic and iambic grammars, were consistent with universal tendencies in that trochaic grammars used intensity, whereas iambic systems used duration in cueing stressed syllables.
