Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

(ii) When a stressable suffix is added to a root in which the final syllable is not stressable
(4.1.2), i.e. is irregular, the position of word stress remains on the stressed syllable of the
root:
iskémle ‘chair’
iskémle-ler ‘chairs’
iskémleler-imiz ‘our chairs’
iskémlelerimiz-de ‘on our chairs’
iskémlelerimizde-ki ‘the one on our chairs’
iskémlelerimizdeki-ler ‘the ones on our chairs’
Afríka ‘Africa’
Afríka-lı ‘African’
Afríkalı-lar ‘Africans’
Afríkalılar-ın ‘of Africans’
As a result, inflected common nouns and inflected place names have different stress
patterns:
mısırdakilér ‘the ones in the maize’
Mísır’dakiler ‘the ones in Egypt’
Turkish: A comprehensive grammar 30
(iii) Some suffixes which are polysyllabic, e.g. -(y)ArAk (8.5.2.2), -mAksIzIn (8.5.1.2), -
sAna, -sAnIzA (8.4), -(I)yor (8.2.3.3) and -(y)Iver, -(y)Agel, -(y)Akal, -(y)Adur and
-(y)Ayaz (8.2.3.2), are stressed on their first syllable. The other syllables in these
suffixes are unstressable:
kaz- ‘dig’ kaz-árak ‘by digging’
bak- ‘look’ bak-máksızın ‘without looking’
gel- ‘come’ gel-íyor ‘s/he is coming’
tut- ‘hold’ tut-úver ‘hold’
şaş- ‘be astounded’ şaş-ákal-dı-m ‘I was astounded’
The first syllable of these polysyllabic suffixes bears the word stress even when other
stressable suffixes follow:
gel-íyor-lar ‘they are coming’
tut-úver-miş ‘apparently s/he suddenly took hold of [it]’
When they attach to irregular roots they either retain their stress, or they lose it and the
original stress of the root reemerges:
Afrikalılaşárak or Afríkalılaşarak ‘by becoming Africanized’