Contrastive Accent and Contrastive Stress

Abstract

'This whiskey,' said O'Reilly, sampling spirits that claimed to be from his homeland, 'was not exported from Ireland; it was deported.' This is the familiar phenomenon of contrast, by which two or more items are counterbalanced and a preference indicated for some member or members of the group. It is the most conspicuous of all the occurrences of phonetic highlighting by reason of its frequency and the extra oomph that we put into it, and because our attention is focused in a way that makes us aware of our speech and not just of our meaning. The name we generally give is contrastive stress, but I propose contrastive accent because of the major contribution that the fundamental pitch of the voice makes to it.l I will keep the old term contrastive stress as well, but restrict its meaning in a way to be explained later. The primary role of pitch in contrastive accent has been known for a long time. H. O. Coleman, in his oft-quoted article of 1914,2 made it the basis of his distinction between 'prominence' and 'intensity.' As an example of prominence he gives