On April 22nd Emory University's Program in Linguistics hosted the third annual Emory Undergrad Linguistic Conference (EULC3)!
One of our undergraduate students, Runze Qian (Undergrad Student at UTSG), presented his work on "The Application of Turkish Vowel Harmony to English Proper Nouns: An Experimental Phonetic Analysis"! His abstract is below.
Runze Qian will be graduating this June and will be heading to the University of Ottawa to purse his Master's of Linguistics! We are excited to see the amazing work he will do there!
The Application of Turkish Vowel Harmony to English Proper Nouns:
An Experimental Phonetic Analysis
Turkish vowel harmony (VH) is a phonological process which dictates that all vowels
in non-compounded words of Turkish origin must agree in backness and/or rounding
(Kabak 2011). The same rule applies to suffixes that are agglutinated to the word stem.
However, there are no rules regarding how VH would apply to suffixes that are attached
to words from another language which include phonemes that do not exist in Turkish
as shown in example (1) and (2). This project aimed to investigate how native speakers
of Turkish who are bilingual in English would apply VH to English proper nouns with
vowel phonemes in the word-final position that do not exist in Turkish by conducting
acoustic phonetic analyses.
English Gloss Possible Harmony Structures
(1) ‘in/at Los Angeles’ Los Angeles'ta Los Angeles'te
(2) ‘of Boston’ Boston'ın Boston'un
Participants were presented with an elicitation task including five paragraphs
written only in English. Each paragraph was designed to have structures that would
require the use of a Turkish suffix agglutinated on an English proper noun. An example
sentence one of the constructed paragraphs is shown in (3). The participants were asked
to do on-site translation of the paragraphs (into Turkish) and their choice of vowels in
the agglutinated suffixes were recorded. After finishing translating all paragraphs,
participants were asked how they would say each structure in Turkish in isolation to
test if the speakers would use different vowels if they were conscious about the structure.
The acoustic properties of each vowel were measured and compared with each other. It
was found that even with the speakers being bilingual, while pronouncing English
proper nouns in a Turkish context, the acoustic qualities of their vowels would shift
towards the qualities of Turkish vowels. It is possible for speakers to pronounce the
vowels differently while being conscious about the structure, but it is not a universal
trend. It was also found that when a suffix is agglutinated, the vowels used to satisfy
VH would match with the final vowel of the stem disregarding how the vowel is
realized in orthography. This proved evidence for VH being a natural phonological
process underlyingly represented in our cognition, rather than a set of grammar rules
that need to be remembered.
(3) I am from Adana, but now I live in Los Angeles.
The next steps of the project will be to examine how would heritage speakers and
foreign language learners of Turkish use vowels to satisfy VH in such structures, and
compare with the data collected from native speakers to see if there are any similarities.
Further researches will also examine how do different groups of speakers pronounce
the vowels in proper nouns differently and if that can be reflective of their acquisition
of the Turkish language.
