Turkish Sentence Stress

Abstract

One of the suprasegmental elements of a language, stress is one of the basic elements necessary for the correct communication and understanding of a message. According to Coşkun (2010: 204), besides leading to differences in the meanings of words, it makes words and phrases the speaker wants to emphasize and wants the listener to pay a special attention to marked; while it contributes to the correct construction of a message that is relayed by the speakers, it helps the listener to understand the message correctly. Though each word and phrase has its separate stress, in a sentence, stress is only on one word. While it is widely held belief that in Turkish, stress in on the word preceding the verb, the place of the stress may change depending on the emotional state of the speaker and the message to be relayed. The purpose of the current study is to elicit the stress system in Turkish by analyzing speech samples taken from different television programs in terms of their stress patterns. Within the context of the current study employing the descriptive method speeches from different television programs were recorded by means of Adobe Audition 1.0 voice program, and these recordings were analyzed in terms of the basic frequency through Praat 3.8.47 voice analysis program.