Asymmetry of Kazakh velar and uvular consonants

Abstract

Little descriptive work has been done on the place and voicing restrictions of the asymmetrical velar and uvular consonant inventory in Kazakh. In Kazakh, velar and uvular consonants are restricted depending on their neighbouring vowel. Velars appear in front vowel environments and uvulars appear in back vowel environments (place restriction). Voiced and voiceless velars and uvulars are restricted depending on their position in the word. At the morpheme boundary, velars and uvulars are voiceless in the word-final position and voiced in the stem-final position, when followed by a vowel-initial suffix (voicing restriction). The results from elicitation-based production experiments with six native Kazakh speakers reveal that the place restriction is not productive from real words to nonce words but the voicing restriction is. The data suggests a derived-environment effect where the resulting voicing process is conditioned morphologically. A theoretical analysis within Optimality Theory captures the voicing pattern using an indexed-markedness constraint and Local Conjunction.