Epenthesis Insertion

Studies in Articulatory Phonology () have established that what sounds like insertion or deletion of a segment can actually be a side effect of gestural timing relations.

The inserted vowel in illegal coda clusters forms the nucleus of a syllable and allows the final consonant to be syllabified as a simple coda.

Turkish stress placement is generally word-final, and like underlying vowels, inserted vowels in coda clusters receive stress when they occur in the final syllable.

DOI: Cross-linguistically, underlying consonant clusters, particularly in loanwords, often surface with a vowel sound separating the two consonants.

In its most familiar form, this vowel sound corresponds to an vowel—an additional vocalic segment inserted by phonology to repair a consonant cluster that is prohibited by the language’s phonology.

THE AMERICAN HERITAGE® DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, FIFTH EDITION by the Editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries.

Copyright © 2016, 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.When vowel intrusion occurs between two consonants, the two consonant gestures are still coordinated with each other.For instance, if vowel epenthesis occurs in complex codas, the maximal syllable for the language might be CVC.Based on acoustic evidence from a production experiment with six Turkish speakers, I argue that such gestural timing produces non-lexical vowels in complex onsets in Turkish—previously described as harmonizing epenthetic vowels (Clements & Sezer, 1982, inter alia).Non-lexical vowels occurred in 88.3% of tokens, and usually resembled [ɯ], failing to undergo vowel harmony.Low vowels may trigger rounding harmony but are not targets for it.This harmony process can be seen in the variable realization of the accusative suffix in (1): [ɯ] following /a/, [i] following /e/, and [y] following /ø/.Like underlying vowels, epenthetic vowels are phonological objects, so they typically do not differ acoustically from underlyingly present vowels, and they generally participate in other phonological processes.In particular, epenthetic vowels crucially participate in syllabification, since they repair illegal syllable structures ().Coda-repairing vowels are also subject to vowel harmony.The Turkish vowel inventory contains eight phonemes distinguished by [±high], [±back], and [±round]; all three features are relevant to harmony, which affects most suffix vowels.