WORD STRESS IN IRAQI TURKMEN WITH REFERNCE TO ENGLISH

Abstract

Stress is a basic concept which is concerned with the  phenomenon of prominence in a word as a result of more effort in breath during its articulation. The problem of the current study is concerned with investigating simple word stress and discovering its patterns according to their  grammatical categories in one of the local languages used in Kirkuk community. The data is collected from everyday life conversations, they are classified according to their grammatical categories and analysed according to the number of their syllable structures, checked by a group of academic native speakers of Turkmen. The validity of the date are analysed acoustically by Praat software  program so as to verify the auditory analysis and to make sure that stress assignment is accurate. The study aims at getting a clear insight of the rules of stress in Iraqi Turkmen. The area of investigation is restricted to simple words of Iraqi Kirkuk Turkmen. In order to carry out the study, it is hypothesized that the stress rules of two-syllable and multi-syllable words are the same in Iraqi Turkmen; and any deviation in stress position in Iraqi Turkmen leads to changes in the meaning and the grammatical categories of the words. Among the conclusions arrived at is that, in Iraqi Turkmen, stress mostly placed on the last syllable in disyllabic and multi-syllable words irrespective of the syllable structure.