On the Accent in Turkish

Abstract

Turkish has been said to have stress accent. A frequent topic of discussion is which syllable stress falls on in the case of exceptional accent patterns, i.e., when the final syllable is not stressed. This study proposes that Turkish should be categorized as having pitch accent rather than stress accent. It is proposed that there are two kinds of accent in Turkish, basic and exceptional. In basic accent a fall in pitch is not observed, while in exceptional accent the pitch falls. Exceptional accent can be further classified into two main types. In exceptional accent pattern A, the existence of a preceding fall takes precedence in accent realization, whereas in exceptional accent pattern B, the pitch always falls regardless of whether there is another fall preceding it. Furthermore, an additional subtype of exceptional accent is proposed in which the pitch falls on the syllable just after the initial syllable depending on the representational function of the semantic category.