7 ms·
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
by badger7 17y ago
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
- jlees 17y agoRe: #7 - She could have stolen your heart :'(
- graemep 17y agoThe 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".
- gabrielroth 17y ago#2 has a more specific meaning: it implies that someone else has claimed that you did say she stole your money.
- stcredzero 17y agoAccording 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_&_Leaves
- ii 17y agoThis 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.
- mahmud 17y agoIn 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.
- vlad 17y agoI think this translation is more accurate and makes for a better proof: Я не говорил что она украла мoи деньги; otherwise, a great point.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- te_platt 17y agoSo 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.
- knowtheory 17y agoThat'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.
- knowtheory 17y agoYARGH. 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/ 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) 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.
- baddox 17y agoActually, 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?
- dasil003 17y agoNope, 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.
- baddox 17y agoNo, 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.
- avocade 17y agoThat's so sad.
- niyazpk 17y agoThis is one reason why NLP is hard.