974: Accentuation Aug 9, 2017

There is a lot of information that is conveyed linguistically beyond just words and beyond pragmatics. English does not have tone in the way that Chinese does in order to indicate lexical information, but there still are way in which accent, intonation, and things of that sort are used to communicate different meaning. In the somewhat famous sentence "I never said she stole the money", every word can be accented differently to produce a different meaning out of the sentence. This information is also useful when differentiating between two words that are spelt the same, such as 'rebel' (noun) and 'rebel' (verb).