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The Semantics Of Stress And Pitch In English, George A. Meyer

Faculty Honor Lectures

Have your ears, not to mention your sensibilities, and your reverence for long established familiar rhythms and meanings been quite rudely jolted?

If each individual present here were to read these well-known lines from the printed page, or recite them from memory, I'm sure that you would, in each case, almost invariably reproduce them with the same stress, pitch, and rhythm patterns. There is comfort and relaxation of mind in rolling out the familiar phrases, with the stresses, relaxation from stress, and variations in pitch, that make them full of meaning.

Contrariwise, when you heard them spoken as I read …