Proceedings of the Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic, 2020
Little is known about patterns of vowel harmony change in language contact situations. Trabzon Tu... more Little is known about patterns of vowel harmony change in language contact situations. Trabzon Turkish (TT), which is spoken in the North East of Turkey and has a language contact history with (Pontic) Greek, Armenian, and Laz, provides such a context. This study investigates vowel harmony in TT and compares it with Standard Turkish (ST). Based on a quantitative analysis derived from a corpus of written texts in TT, this study shows how TT exhibits partial vowel harmony. TT displays a reduced amount of vowel harmony compared to ST, which suggest that TT might have experienced decay. Additional findings of this study indicate that vowels are influenced by following adjacent consonants, some suffixes have fixed forms with non-alternating vowels, but linear harmony decay across the word is not observed.
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 2018
This research examines a partial (emphatic) reduplication process in Turkish that forms intensifi... more This research examines a partial (emphatic) reduplication process in Turkish that forms intensified adjectives/adverbs with one of four linkers m, p, r, and s (e.g., bem.bejaz, ip.iri). This study goes beyond earlier works by investigating the responses of native Turkish speakers to intensifying nonce words without limiting them about the choice of linkers. The results indicate although this reduplication process is influenced by phonology, the selection of linkers is lexically determined in existing Turkish adjectives/adverbs. With nonce words, native speakers appear to adopt secondary strategies that include using a linker copied from the base, omitting a linker, and dissimilation of the linker and the initial consonant of a C-initial base.
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Papers by Nese Demir