Vowel Harmony and Other Morphological Processes in Turkish

Abstract

Vowel harmony appears to be a regular phonological process in Turkish, but nevertheless is not exceptionless. Due to these exceptions, it cannot be considered as part of the active phonology of Turkish. An analysis is proposed in which morphology and lexicon control vowel harmony and other processes similar in this regard. Morphology is unlike other modules of grammar in requiring access to all of syntactic, semantic, and phonological properties to function. One of the roles of morphology is to give commands to the phonology during formation of a complex word, such as "Carry out vowel harmony!" The phonology need not account for why such a command does not accompany certain suffixes, why it does not apply to all roots, nor why other commands only accompany a few suffixes. More generally, there is no need for phonology to access morphological information in a modular model of grammar.