The prosodic structure of Turkish accent patterns

Abstract The accent patterns of Turkish have been analyzed in various ways, yet there is still no consensus on their prosodic structure. Focusing on constructions with suffixes, clitics, and auxiliaries, we examine the extent to which the accent patterns must be lexically specified, and how to best represent them. It is shown that the accent patterns are predictable for clitics, mostly predictable for auxiliaries, and less predictable for suffixes. A grid-based approach that encodes ‘accent’ and ‘(un)accentability’ separately is proposed to analyze both the predictable and the unpredictable patterns in a unified way.