Re: [tied] Stress.

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 8712
Date: 2001-08-24

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 -----
From: markodegard@...
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
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?).