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Comment by badger7 | Hacker News Reader

Just had to spell this out to a colleague, so thought I may as well post it. It should be "didn't say", rather than "never said", but the gist is the same ;)

I didn't say she stole my money - someone else said it

I didn't say she stole my money - I didn't say it

I didn't say she stole my money - I only implied it

I didn't say she stole my money - I said someone did, not necessarily her

I didn't say she stole my money - I considered it borrowed, even though she didn't ask

I didn't say she stole my money - only that she stole money

I didn't say she stole my money - she stole stuff which cost me money to replace

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YARGH. Okay so this is one of the primary areas of research that one of my professors from university studies ( http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~croberts/ ).

None of the explanations that people have written here are entirely correct or reflect what's actually going on.

The phenomenon that's being discussed here is something called Contrastive Stress. It is a part of an interesting area of research on Linguistic Focus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_(linguistics)) that sits at the juncture of Semantics (meaning in abstract), Pragmatics (meaning in context), and Autosemgental Phonology (mental representation of sounds and their production of non-phoneme related stuff).

So, contrastive stress ties directly into the notion that sentences are stated in response to either explicit or implicit questions. In fact the location of the emphatic stress is directly related to what question the speaker is trying to answer.

So, you can actually do this with nearly any sentence, simply by placing the stress on a different word.

Badger's account is mostly correct, but it's tied in a little closer with grammar than his examples actually intimate. I'd say that there's a much wider range of possible candidates for say:

Did you say she stole your money? I didn't say she stole my money, i know/saw/heard/thought/wrote/hinted/testified/dreamed it!

"It" in this context is the entire grammatical structure "she stole my money". The reason why this is important is because of the notion of what can be stressed and what the stress is actually applied/scoped to.

=========================================

You can do this with other sentences as well:

George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

"Is jeb bush the 43rd president of the united states?"

No, George Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

"Is George Washington the 43rd President of the United States?"

No, George Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

"George Bush isn't the 43rd President of the United States, right?"

No, George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

"Was there more than one 43rd president of the united states?"

No, George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

"Was George W. Bush the 44th President of the United States?"

No, George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

"Was George W. Bush the 43rd Vice President of the United States?"

No, George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

(okay, so "of" is a function word that we can't contrast against anything else)

"Was George W. Bush the 43rd President of the United Arab Emerates?"

No George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

etc.

So this really is a general phenomenon that you not only see every day, but really use on a constant basis. Every sentence has grammatical stress, it's how we know what other people are focusing on when they speak.

I can see how your explanation is more complete, but is there anything wrong in badger7's post?

No, i'm not saying that Badger's post is incorrect (it correctly defines the phenomenon). Some of the other posts on this thread are all over the place, and don't describe the phenomenon or what underlies it.

So sorry if i gave the impression that Badger7 is wrong, he's not, he just doesn't explain what's going on, or what the full scope of the phenomenon is :)

The similarity between this response and the sample ones made me laugh.

"Is there anything wrong in badger7's post?" "No, I'm not saying Badger's post is incorrect"

The double-negative makes alternative emphases difficult, but I'm tempted.

I took it as it was meant. My colleague doubted the basic assertion, so I was providing an example of each - it wasn't intended to be comprehensive :)

um, I reckon you can put constrastive stress on function words, as in in the street against on the street and President of the United States against President (of UAE) in the United States.

(okay, so "of" is a function word that we can't contrast against anything else)

"Was George W. Bush the 43rd President from the United States?"

Yeah i guess that's one way to do that. There's not much of a semantic distinction there, so that comes off as more of a sentence that's focusing on stressing a syntactic difference not a semantic one. But point taken :)

My memory of these terms is weak, but isn't this metalinguistic contrast? You're not using the word 'of' when you stress it here, you're mentioning it.

According to training I got as a volunteer in Washington, this drives native Vietnamese speakers crazy. I think it may confuse older Koreans as well. My grandma didn't get it at all.

I think this is a part of what makes English one of the best languages to tell a lie in.

Pauses can similarly change the meaning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_&_Leaves

This applies to many other languages. I can translate all this to Russian and this phenomenon will hold: "Я не говорил что она украла у меня деньги" -- the same 7 meanings depending on stress.

In Arabic

انا لم اقل بأنها سرقت مالي

Ana lam aqul bi'anaha saraqat maali

If you stress any particular word, you will have to insert or remove parts of the speech in order to conjugate and decline words as necessary:

(1) Ana lam aqul bi'anaha saraqat maali

(2)Laysa ana man qal bi'anaha saraqat maali .. or (2.b) Lestu ana man qal bi'anaha saraqat maali

(3) Ana ma qultu bi'anaha saraqat maali

(4) Ma qultu bi'anahaa saraqat maali

(5) Lam aqul bi'anahaa hiya man saraqa maali (or "man saraqat maali" when implying an all female list of suspects.)

(6) Ana lam aqul inahaa saraqat maali

(7) Ana lam aqul inahaa saraqat maaliya (anaa)

Sometimes Arabic is way too precise and makes puns a little harder.

I think this translation is more accurate and makes for a better proof: Я не говорил что она украла мoи деньги; otherwise, a great point.

Re: #7 - She could have stolen your heart :'(

that sounds painful

it didn't seem painful from what I saw in Indiana Jones

Of course neither did getting blasted in a nuclear explosion as long as you have a fridge to hide in.

The stress adds information. #2 is the basic meaning (it is true for all of the others as well), a stress on any other word adds information about what you did way/imply.

Incidentally, some still bear alternative interpretations: e.g., #3 could be interpreted as "I only thought it".

#2 has a more specific meaning: it implies that someone else has claimed that you did say she stole your money.

So what does it mean if you don't put emphasis on any of the words? Or more than one? Also, I can't stop reading the comments without putting emphasis on random words now. I can almost make any sentence say what I want it to, or at least distort the intended meaning.

That's known as "neutral stress" and can just be an assertion of fact. The topic/question under discussion may be undefined, for example.

Sentences can also have multiple stresses, and you may have multiple topics under discussion. Sentences still have a primary stress, but can have secondary stresses as well.

Who sang what to whom?

Pat sang "I feel pretty" to Jackie!

Implicit here are three stresses, which may indicate the following: Pat sang, can you believe it? I didn't know pat could sing! Pat sang "i feel pretty", who would have know that Pat likes show tunes? Pat sang "i feel pretty" to Jackie. Jackie was the wrong person to sing to, because Jackie hates the music from West Side Story.

Actually, I would consider the meaning of all the sentences to be the same. The implications are all different, but that's really not surprising or profound in itself. I mean, you could also say that sentence 10 different times referring to 10 different "she's," but that's not at all surprising, is it?

Nope, analogy fail. The meaning is absolutely different. If someone says to you "She took how much of your money?", and you reply "I didn't say she stole my money" that means something completely different than "I didn't say she stole my money". Who the pronoun refers to is completely external to the parsing of the sentence.

No, they meanings are really the same. You're telling the person that you did not do something. That something, no matter which word you stress, is the acting of saying she stole your money.

This is one reason why NLP is hard.

That's so sad.

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