“Grammatical stress” isn’t a technical term, as far as I know. In any event, the phenomenon we’re discussing here is the grammatical function of a word being communicated by the intonation pattern (as well as, probably, the speed pattern) of the sentence in which the word occurs.
“Grammatical stress” isn’t a technical term, as far as I know.
I am not a linguist, but I’ve see the term “grammatical stress” used to denote situations where the stress of a word is determined by its syntactic context, and where a difference in stress may imply a different syntactic structure of the sentence. This is in contrast to lexical stress, which is a context-independent property of each word, and intonation, whose variation doesn’t affect the syntactic structure, but merely changes things at the level of pragmatics.
Now that I’ve googled around a bit, I see that these terms aren’t really standardized, and authors who use them typically make sure to include their favored definitions to avoid confusion. If you use “intonation” also for what I call “grammatical stress” above, then fair enough. (And for all I know, such usage might indeed be more common.)
Still, I think the contrast I have in mind is worth pointing out. In the above example, the difference in stress implies a different syntactic structure—“have” can either be a complete verb phrase, or just an auxiliary verb referring to an antecedent (i.e. a verb phrase ellipsis). This is different from situations where changing intonation affects only pragmatics.
I’m not sure it’s a good idea to restrict the use of “intonation” to describing pitch patterns that don’t convey syntactic information. I suppose if one did that, one would have to simply say “pitch” for what we are talking about here, unless there’s another term available.
Come to think of it, you’re right. It make sense to define “intonation” in purely phonetic terms (i.e. as pitch variation), and in that sense, it’s certainly present here. It is possible that I got a mistaken idea about the common technical meaning of this term in my amateurish forays into these subjects.
If we’re going to be really precise, wouldn’t the difference here be a matter of grammatical stress rather than intonation?
“Grammatical stress” isn’t a technical term, as far as I know. In any event, the phenomenon we’re discussing here is the grammatical function of a word being communicated by the intonation pattern (as well as, probably, the speed pattern) of the sentence in which the word occurs.
komponisto:
I am not a linguist, but I’ve see the term “grammatical stress” used to denote situations where the stress of a word is determined by its syntactic context, and where a difference in stress may imply a different syntactic structure of the sentence. This is in contrast to lexical stress, which is a context-independent property of each word, and intonation, whose variation doesn’t affect the syntactic structure, but merely changes things at the level of pragmatics.
Now that I’ve googled around a bit, I see that these terms aren’t really standardized, and authors who use them typically make sure to include their favored definitions to avoid confusion. If you use “intonation” also for what I call “grammatical stress” above, then fair enough. (And for all I know, such usage might indeed be more common.)
Still, I think the contrast I have in mind is worth pointing out. In the above example, the difference in stress implies a different syntactic structure—“have” can either be a complete verb phrase, or just an auxiliary verb referring to an antecedent (i.e. a verb phrase ellipsis). This is different from situations where changing intonation affects only pragmatics.
I’m not sure it’s a good idea to restrict the use of “intonation” to describing pitch patterns that don’t convey syntactic information. I suppose if one did that, one would have to simply say “pitch” for what we are talking about here, unless there’s another term available.
Come to think of it, you’re right. It make sense to define “intonation” in purely phonetic terms (i.e. as pitch variation), and in that sense, it’s certainly present here. It is possible that I got a mistaken idea about the common technical meaning of this term in my amateurish forays into these subjects.