Towards Focus Typology in Turkish

Resumo

This paper presents first results of a pilot study conducted in order to classify Turkish with respect to focus typology. The production study gives motivation to discuss the prosodic marking of contrastive in-situ focus in Turkish in the framework of prosodic alignment. Outcomes are based on a phonological analysis of information structure modified target sentences of six monolingual Turkish speakers which reveal that prosodic cues are not crucial to mark in-situ focus in Turkish, but they may be used to contextualize information structure. If focused constituents are marked at all by prosodic means they do not show an increased pitch like most Germanic languages, but can be classified according to the features of boundary languages. The analysis exposes that Turkish is a radical splitting language where each constituent forms its own ϕ in simple all-new SOV declaratives marked by a high phrase tone (H-) aligned to each ω. The language´s preference for radical splitting can be modified into a moderate prosodic wrapping in favor of focus alignment: A focused constituent is aligned to prosodic boundaries in the sense of being wrapped into its own ϕ whereas given constituents are wrapped together in a further ϕ going in hand with the deletion or compression of phrase tones assigned by default.