Does Turkish diss harmony?

Abstract

This article presents a Government Phonology (GP) analysis of disharmonic words in Turkish. According to GP, phonology is exceptionless. Following this claim, I will argue that the generalisations intended to capture vowel harmony in Turkish had been stated in the wrong way, leading to disharmonic words as an artefact of a faulty analysis. Once this is remedied, the exceptions vanish, allowing for a unified treatment of harmonic and disharmonic words. This also takes into account further details of the Turkish vowel system which had not been incorporated in previous analyses, as well as distributional asymmetries between stems and suffixes.