OCP Effects in Turkish Partial Reduplication: Locality and Feature Specificity

Project Summary:

This paper investigates the partial (emphatic) reduplication in Turkish, used with modifiers (adverbs and adjectives), which gives the modifier the meaning of `fullness' (Demircan 1987). The reduplicant, realized as a prefix, has the form (C1)VC2. C2 of the reduplicant prefix ends in one of the four linking consonants (LC): -p, -m, -s, -r (Lewis 1967), e.g. beyaz `white' > bem-beyaz `very white'. Previous studies on the topic approach the issue from different angles with different OCP constraints (Hatiboğlu 1973, Demircan 1987, Dobrovolsky 1987, Taneri 1990, Wedel 1999, Kelepir 2000, Yu 1999, Sofu 2005, Sofu & Altan 2008). Many relied solely on intuitions, examined a small number of items, used a forced-choice task and not a rating task. This study undertakes a comprehensive data collection and analysis of the positional and feature specificity of the OCP effects. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of Turkish Particial Reduplication. We highlight that the OCP constraints are more graded than they have been previously proposed. Our findings support previous work on the formulations of OCP constraints that treat individual features as free parameters in the similarity computation. The surprising finding with regard to locality is that not only the OCP effect extends all the way from C1 to C4, but it is a function of both the proximity from LC and the position in syllable structures.