Turkish syllable structure: A Statistical Study

The main purpose of this paper is to explore, on the basis of a quite extensive corpus (certain body of data) drawn from Azeri (different variety of Turkish) language, the distribution and the frequency of the syllable structures as well as the frequency of vowels in the syllable structures, in order to achieve the core and unmarked trends in the syllable structure and the more preferable syllable head in the phonological system of Azeri. According to the descriptive analysis, the CVC syllable and the CV.CV.CVC syllable were the most frequent syllable structures. The results of the vowel frequency in all syllable structure’s analysis showed that the highest frequencies were for the low vowels [ӕ, ɑ], the lowest frequencies were for the mid vowels [e, o, ø] and the high vowels [i, u, y, ɯ] are in between the two categories.