Verhoeven Elisabeth. Vowel harmony and noun inflection in Caucasian Urum

Documentation project. — University of Bremen, 2011. — 18 p.This article is a study of vowel harmony within the nominal inflectional system of Caucasian Urum, a Turkish variety spoken by ethnic Greek speakers in Georgia. Empirical evidence comes from an elicitation study including repeated observations with eight native speakers of Urum. A comparison with the contemporary standard Turkish system in the same grammatical domain reveals that part of the systems is identical in both languages, namely vowel harmony with so-called A-type suffixes. However, in contrast to standard Turkish, some Urum nominal suffixes (belonging to the I-type) are partially opaque, others are completely opaque to harmony rules. Based on evidence from complex cases of suffixation we argue that opacity appears on the right edge of the harmony span, i.e., applies with priority to the rightmost suffixes of a word.