Abstract
SENTENCE STRESS IN TURKISH PROVERBS
Proverbs are one of the ways that societies trans-mit their cultural values from one generation to the next. A word or combination of words stands out more than the others in any of the aspects of a large number of the proverbs examined in this study. It transfers emotion more effectively since it is expressed more clearly. Proverbs are known for their sentence stress on adjectives, adverbs, and place-indicating terms. This might be unders-tood as an external manifestation of the goal to guide people toward the good through counsel ba-sed on collective experiences. Proverbs are catego-rized into three primary classes based on this ob-servation: place-stressed, adverb-stressed, and adjective-stressed. Their corresponding structures are also covered. Adjectives have the strongest sentence stress in proverbs, and it is evident that they primarily convey a quality of the subject. Af-ter adjectives, adverbs (mostly derived from verbs) have the highest sentence stress. Place-indicating words can also contain sentence stress. Because proverbs are the byproducts of human-oriented oral culture, the fact that sentence stress is focu-sed on an adjective—that is, an attribute of the subject—is interpreted as an attempt to keep the subject from being viewed negatively and to enco-urage them to be good by drawing attention to that attribute. Adverbs, which typically involve action, also have strong sentence stress because of an innate need to shield the reader from inapp-ropriate behavior by emphasizing the cause-and-effect relationship and pointing them in the direc-tion of appropriate behavior.
Keywords
Turkish proverbs, sentence stress, transposition of emotions, stressed adjective, stressed adverb