Abstract
At the present study, the morpho-phonological processes of different cases of nouns in Azeri Turkish, Zanjani Dialect were studied based on Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolenski, 1993). This was a descriptive-analytical study and was based on interviews with native speakers of Zanjan, Iran. Azeri Turkish is an agglutinative language in which prepositions (better to say post-positions) are added to the noun roots as suffixes. Nouns have six different cases, namely, absolutive, accusative, dative, ablative, locative, genitive. Morpho-phonological processes are those phonological processes that occur in the boundaries between morphemes (between noun roots and suffixes). In this study, constraints were identified and ranked. Those constraints which were of two kinds ( markedness and faithfulness constraints) compete against one another so as to select the optimal candidate. Results showed that ONSET and HARMONY constraints were considered as high-ranked and fatal constraints, whereas DEP-IO and MAX-IO were regarded as low-ranked constraints in Azeri Turkish Language. These two constraints (DEP and MAX) are employed in order to prohibit HIAITUS in Azeri Turkish which is strictly forbidden. In addition, IDENT-IO constraint was considered as a low-ranked constraint, the violation of which didn’t render the candidate non-optimal.
Main Subjects
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