Selection of Linker Type in Emphatic Reduplication: Speaker’s Intuition meets Corpus Statistics

Selection of Linker Type in Emphatic Reduplication: Speaker’s Intuition meets Corpus Statistics Ozkan Kilic¸ (ozkan.kilic@gmail.com) Cem Bozs¸ahin (bozsahin@metu.edu.tr) Department of Cognitive Science, Graduate School of Informatics Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey Abstract (1) ka-s-kati c¸i-r-il-c¸iplak RED solid RED naked ‘hard as a rock’ ‘totally naked’ pa-r-am-parc¸a d¨u-p-e-d¨uz RED torn RED plain ‘completely torn apart’ ‘utterly’ Turkish Emphatic Reduplication (TER) occurs in adjectives and adverbs to accentuate their meanings. The current exper- imental study to investigate the selection of the linker type in TER indicated that responses from the participants correlate with some lexical statistics. The result relies on the statistics from a corpus with approximately 2 million Turkish words, which we use in lieu of lexical statistics. The frequency or- der of linker choice reported by the participants was exactly the opposite of the order of frequency of words in which the linker and the first consonant co-occur consecutively in the cor- pus. Such a direct link to lexicon was unexpected. We suggest that TER, an apparently phonological operation, depends on lexical access for selecting the appropriate linker whose co- occurrence with the initial consonant of the reduplicated word is infrequent. Our results relate morphology and lexicon in more ways than the blocking phenomena, and suggest that TER may be morpholexical. Keywords: Morphology; emphatic reduplication; lexicon; lexical frequency. Related Work Introduction Turkish is generally considered to be a language with subject- object-verb word order, and it is morphologically agglutinat- ing, with considerably involved morphology. The Turkish word structure depends heavily on suffixes, which are trans- parently stacked on the leftmost stem like “beads on a string” (see Kornfilt, 1997; Lewis, 2000; G¨oksel & Kerslake, 2005 for a detailed review of Turkish). However, not all Turkish morphology is suffixal, and it is not always the case that we can enumerate the allomorphies clearly in non-suffixal mor- phology and phonology, with some good variation among speakers, which is not the case for suffixal morphology. Per- haps not surprisingly, these cases involve items which might appear to look like prefixes. We suggest a way to relate these differences in the processing of bound items to lexical statis- tics, as evidence for another case of interaction between mor- phology and lexicon. Turkish Emphatic Reduplication, henceforth TER, is one such resource showing greater speaker variation. It is a derivational process which intensifies the meaning of adjec- tives and some adverbs. Phonologically it involves the du- plication of the initial (C)V of the base, and addition of a prefix-like item as a linker to the root, which is a consonant from the set {p, s, m, r}. (Demircan, 1987; Oztaner 1996; Wedel, 1999; Yu, 1999; Kelepir, 2000; Kim, 2007; Dhillon, 2009). All words beginning with a vowel are infixed with -p- as the linker. In some cases the (C)V+linker “prefix” is also followed by an additional “infix” from the set {-A, -Il, -Am} as in some of the examples below. Inkelas & Zoll (2005) use cophonology to explain emphatic reduplication. A cophonology is a morphological func- tion associated with particular morphological constructions to model morphologically conditioned phonology. Cophonolo- gies receive words or morphemes as input, and perform some operations such as constraint ranking, truncation, and velar deletion on the input to be sent to the phonological interface (Inkelas & Orgun, 1995; Inkelas, 2000). Truncation and ad- dition act on the word beyaz ‘white’ to produce bem−. Then, the mother node links the subconstituent daughters to the in- put and shifts stress to the truncated one to form b´embeyaz ‘snow white’. Demircan (1987), and later Wedel (1999, 2000), examined TER as a phonological operation and sum- marized the linker selection constraints as follows: (2) (i) The linker from the set {p, s, m, r} cannot be identi- cal with the initial consonant (C 1 ) of the base: pembe ‘pink’ → *peppembe, although p ∈ {p, s, m, r}. Per- pembe is possible but not likely (see below). (ii) The linker cannot be identical to the second consonant (C 2 ) of the base: pembe → *pempembe/pespembe, al- though m ∈ {p, s, m, r}. (iii) The phonetic features {coronal, sonorant, labial, con- tinuant} of the linker cannot be identical with those of the second segment of the base. The linker with the most contrasting features is selected for perceptual salience. (iv) The linker is selected in a way that it can establish an optimization or balance among the features contribut- ing to the featural contrast with respect to base. Some examples in Turkish seem to be orthogonal to these constraints. For example, in addition to c¸i-r-il-c¸iplak, which is the commonly assumed reduplicated form of c¸iplak as in (1), c¸i-s-c¸iplak, c¸i-r-c¸iplak, c¸i-m-c¸iplak and c¸i-p-c¸iplak do oc- cur in the Web.