Please join us in Cobb Hall 202 on Friday, January 19 at 3:30 PM for the first LVC of the Winter Quarter! Our very own Kutay Serova will be talking about vowel harmony alternation in singular dative pronouns.

Dative Pronoun Alternation in Turkic Languages: A Phonological Analysis and Diachronic Family-Internal Typology 

Turkic languages are a strongly suffixing family of languages, where word forms are derived by attaching various suffixes to the end of roots and stems. Crucially, these languages also show a strong direction of phonological form conditioning: a stem-to-suffix, or left-to-right conditioning where the form of the stem determines the form of the suffix, not vice versa. In this talk, I show a case where this directionality is reversed, where the suffix triggers a form change in the stem: in singular pronouns, the dative suffix triggers phonological changes to the pronoun root, in contrast to the usual direction of change — this exceptional case is what I call the dative pronoun alternation.

I survey the pronoun forms in 16 modern and historical Turkic language varieties, and show that all but two varieties robustly replicate the alternation with minor differences. I develop a language family-internal typology of this alternation based on these minute differences, and propose a unified phonological analysis conditioned by nominal structure size. Finally, I sketch a possible diachronic account of how the various attested flavors of dative pronoun alternation within the language family descend from a single Proto-Turkic dative pronoun alternation through a handful of historical phonological changes.