Phonological and Morphological Conditions on Dorsals in Kazakh: Productivity in Production and Acceptability

This thesis examines the productivity of place and voicing restrictions on Kazakh dorsal obstruents. Previous work claims that velars occur only with front vowels, and uvulars only with back vowels, in native Kazakh words; stem-final dorsal plosives are voiceless word-finally and voiced intervocalically in all Kazakh words; and the voiceless dorsal fricative (notated as /X/) appears only in loanwords, but its exact place and voicing behaviour remains unclear. Existing descriptions contain limited explanations and data, so key questions remain: Is the place restriction productive? Are velars and uvulars contrastive in stem-final position? How does /X/ behave? To address these questions, I conducted two nonce word experiments.The first experiment involved two production tasks: producing target dorsals in different positions and vowel environments, and producing stem-final dorsals in inflected nonce forms. The analysis examines various acoustic measurements confirm that the voicing restriction was productive, but the place restriction was not. Specifically, all dorsals were produced with the target place regardless of vowel environment, while stem-final plosives were produced with voicing intervocalically and voicelessly word-finally. The second experiment involved two acceptability judgement tasks: judging acceptability of target word-final dorsals, and judging stem-final dorsal alternations in an inflected paradigm. In the first task, participants accepted licit forms, but rejected illicit ones, with gradient acceptability favouring forms satisfying the voicing restriction over the place restriction. In the second task, participants preferred paradigms respecting the place restriction in both member forms, with gradient acceptability favouring the place restriction in inflected forms over base forms. The results for /X/ suggest that it is more velar in production, but patterns closer with uvulars in acceptability of alternations. However, it was overall not accepted as a native sound, likely due to its occurrence only in loanwords. This thesis contributes to the understanding of Kazakh phonology with production and acceptability experiments, and by finding that the place and voicing restrictions have different behaviour in production and that there seems to be gradient acceptability that privileges the voicing restriction over both the place restriction and paradigm uniformity and that privileges enforcing the place restriction on inflected forms over base stems.

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