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Article published In: Linguistics in the Netherlands 2025
Edited by Kristel Doreleijers, Remco Knooihuizen and Eva van Lier
[Nota Bene 2:2] 2025
► pp. 357–372

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The prosodic structure of Turkish accent patterns

 | Waseda University
 | Leiden University
Published online: 31 October 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/nb.00038.pop
Abstract
The accent patterns of Turkish have been analyzed in various ways, yet there is still no consensus on their prosodic structure. Focusing on constructions with suffixes, clitics, and auxiliaries, we examine the extent to which the accent patterns must be lexically specified, and how to best represent them. It is shown that the accent patterns are predictable for clitics, mostly predictable for auxiliaries, and less predictable for suffixes. A grid-based approach that encodes ‘accent’ and ‘(un)accentability’ separately is proposed to analyze both the predictable and the unpredictable patterns in a unified way.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Final accent and non-final accent
  • 3.Regular interface patterns and two types of lexical specification
    • 3.1Regular interface patterns
    • 3.2The representation of accent and accentability
  • 4.Comparison to previous approaches
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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