Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

4
WORD STRESS
The term stress refers to the high pitch and loudness with which a syllable is pronounced
relative to others in the same word or sequence of words. This chapter discusses the
position of stress in isolated words. The syllable which is stressed in an isolated word is
the same one which is stressed when that particular word is the most prominent one
within a sequence of words (see Chapters 5 and 23). In this chapter an acute accent will
be used to indicate a stressed syllable. The conditions determining sentence stress, i.e.
which particular word within a sentence is to be stressed, are discussed in Chapter 23.
4.1 STRESS IN ROOTS
4.1.1 REGULAR ROOTS
Most roots in Turkish (including all polysyllabic verbal roots and some loan words) are
stressable on the final syllable:
kadín ‘woman’
kalabalík ‘crowd’
cumhuriyét ‘republic’
hastá ‘ill’
kutú ‘box’
beklé ‘wait’
öğrén ‘learn’
Where a particular root is stressable on a syllable other than the last, this is indicated in
dictionary entries.
In vocative forms, i.e. forms of address, stress is placed on the penultimate syllable:
Kádın! ‘Hey woman!’
Çocúklar! ‘Hey kids!’
Hüséyin! ‘Hüseyin!’
If a diminutive suffix (-CIK, 7.2.2.2, or its inflected form -CIğIm) is added to a form of
address, the stress remains in its original position:
Semrá’cığım ‘Semra darling!’