Voicing and consonantal strength in Kazakh suffixes (abstract)

by Alex Eulenberg

In Kazakh, there appear to be three constraints governing the choice of initial consonant for suffixes. The first is an assimilation constraint, Share Larynx, which requires that two consecutive obstruents have the same laryngeal properties (i.e. voicedness). The second is another assimilation constraint, Spread Nasal, which requires that an onset be nasal if the surrounding consonants are nasal. The third is a syllable structure constraint, Contact Strength Harmony, which prefers syllable contacts where the second consonant is stronger than the first. These three constraints, understood as ranked and violable in the sense of Prince and Smolensky (1993), in combination with various other "faithfulness to the base (input) form" constraints, appear to account for the variation among suffix-initial consonants. However, there is an exceptionality in the behavior of suffixes with base-initial /n/ that is shared by other Turkic languages.