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Forgive me, all, if this has been posted here before. I can’t remember where I found it.
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Found years ago on, I think, the Home Depot site:
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Very disappointed. I was expecting something more obscene.
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That’s all very well but what became of my lunch?
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You are probably looking for “pragmatics”.
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That one means that the other person said “What?” the other eight times you said it.
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That reminds me of a skit I saw once where this guy walks into a store with a phrase book and repeats the same phrase over and over again with different intonations.
The exasperated storekeeper says “You finish”? and was answered “No I’m Danish”.
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“Pragmatics” is a little broader than what I’m grasping for, but the distinction definitely falls into that category.
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The linguistic category that the “emphasis” usually falls into is generally called “focus”.
Some traditional syntactic theories account for it, e.g. Roll and Reference Grammar and HPSG.
As you point out, narrowly speaking, it isn’t part of semantics at all, so all those sentences really “mean” the same thing.
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Thanks! This is definitely exactly what I was looking for, and I never would have come across that term by banging my head against my old linguistics books (or Wikipedia).
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At some random point in the past, circumstances aligned such that I found myself adminstering a written test orally to a pair of engineers from the Czech Republic. Their English was definitely better than my Czech, but the language barrier was still quite high.
That particular test, in the form that we used for oral exams, was not of the highest quality in a number of ways, but that was out of our hands. Toward the end of the ordeal (and I assure you, it was an ordeal) one of them seemed to be asking me if anybody had even checked these questions.
It turned out he was trying to ask me if there was anybody else that could give them that test, preferably somebody that spoke Czech. It was all I could do not to come back with “Yes, of course we have three people in the office that speak Czech, but everyone felt it would be much funnier to send me in here instead.”
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Paige! No!
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I think you’re both right.
If I were to say the sentence without consciously trying to emphasise any word, the stress would naturally fall on “said”: I don’t know if it’s because it’s the verb, or the third word, or the fourth syllable, or whatever. My meaning would be simply “I didn’t accuse her of eating my sandwich,” with no implication of alternative accusers, accusees, transgressive acts, comestibles, etc.
As @Ratel says, this is functionally identical to emphasising “never”, though that would carry extra emotional import: someone reporting my speech might say I hotly denied making the accusation.
But if the stress on “said” went beyond that instinctive, natural level to a conscious and deliberate emphasis, it would have the meaning @SamSam describes.
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You can squeeze even more interpretations for the sentence if you start looking at multiple words emphasized.
You can get “You were the one who accused her of eating your sandwich.”
And if you look at context with inside jokes or innuendo (especially with the use of air quotes), you can even get something like, “I didn’t accuse her of sleeping with my brother (but she did).”
In the end, words and even sentences mean very little without context.
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Yeah. I had a joking post removed the other day that, on reflection, could easily be read as more pointed than I intended. Rather than get defensive, I recognized why the post was removed. Maybe it would have fared better with a silly emoji at the end to communicate tone better.
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Pragmatics! (See also: category debates!)
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