{"id":8756,"date":"2021-03-22T14:56:32","date_gmt":"2021-03-22T21:56:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/?p=8756"},"modified":"2021-03-22T12:21:25","modified_gmt":"2021-03-22T19:21:25","slug":"prosodic-stress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/2021\/03\/22\/prosodic-stress\/","title":{"rendered":"Prosodic Stress"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve always been bothered that English writing has no great way of describing prosodic stress. I only learned that term today but I’ve understood it for decades! What is “prosodic stress”? I’ll borrow from Wikipedia which has a nice definition and example<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I<\/i> \u00a0didn’t take the test yesterday. (Somebody else did.)
\nI \u00a0didn’t<\/i> \u00a0take the test yesterday. (I did not take it.)
\nI didn’t \u00a0take<\/i> \u00a0the test yesterday. (I did something else with it.)
\nI didn’t take \u00a0the<\/i> \u00a0test yesterday. (I took one of several. \u00a0or<\/i> \u00a0I didn’t take the specific test that would have been implied.)
\nI didn’t take the \u00a0test<\/i> \u00a0yesterday. (I took something else.)
\nI didn’t take the test \u00a0yesterday<\/i>. (I took it some other day.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>Sadly, italics and bold usually come off as gauche, similar to how red circles get overused in memes.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Thanks to Tom Scott’s Why Shakespeare Could Never Have Been French<\/a> video for teaching me the term!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve always been bothered that English writing has no great way of describing prosodic stress. I only learned that term today but I’ve understood it for decades! What is “prosodic stress”? I’ll borrow from Wikipedia which has a nice definition and example: I \u00a0didn’t take the test yesterday. (Somebody else did.) I \u00a0didn’t \u00a0take the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8756\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}