I'd call it contrastive rather than
phonemic in the technical sense: the same phoneme may be found in stressed and
unstressed positions. Stress is not a "feature" like [front], [lateral] or
[nasal], but a matter of alternating rhythmic strength, just as intonation is a
pattern of pitch movements superimposed on a string of segments. "Yes" is
phonemically /jes/, but different intonations modify its meaning: "Yes." "Yes?"
"Yes!" Stress often serves as a cue helping the listener to figure out the
structure of a phrase, as in your example (or, say, "a moving-van" : "a moving
van". Note, however, that it rarely distinguishes the meaning of _words_ in
English, as opposed to larger syntactic units (if it does, it usually
distinguishes deverbal nouns from verbs, as in "IMport" :
"imPORT").
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, August 24, 2001 1:25 AM
Subject: [tied] Stress.
Piotr will slap me around where I'm wrong, or misusing the
nomenclature.
Consider:
A blackbird cage
and
A black
birdcage
In spoken Modern English, the only feature that separates these
'minimal pairs' is stress. Then, Piotr, can we say stress is *phonemic* in
English? (if phonemic is not the term, then what is it?).