The significance of intonation in discourse 39difficult matter and depends on an understanding of the concept of prominent
syllable.
Prominent syllables
Brazil points out that it is not always easy, in the literature of phonology, to
be sure what significance is attached to such terms as ‘stress’, ‘accent’, ‘salience’,
and ‘prominence’. By ‘accent’ Brazil means the attribute which invariably
distinguishes the marked from the unmarked syllables in words like ‘curtain’,
‘contain’, ‘relation’, and which distinguishes the lexical items from the others
in a sentence like ‘Tom is the best boy in the class.’ The expression ‘word
accent’, although tautologous, may serve as a reminder that accent is an
inherent property of the word, which, being inherent, has no possible contrastive
significance. When we say ‘Tom is the best boy in the class’ we are not
accenting ‘is’, we are making it ‘pitch prominent’. (A full discussion of the
fundamental frequency characteristics of prominent syllables can be found in
Brazil (1978a), and a briefer but more accessible discussion in Brazil et al.
(1980). ‘Prominence’ is thus a property associated with a word by virtue of
its function as a constituent of a particular tone unit.
We are now in a position to define the scope of the tonic segment. The
tonic segment begins with the first prominent syllable, henceforth called the
‘onset’, and ends with the last prominent syllable, the ‘tonic’, which in
addition has a pitch movement. (From now on all prominent syllables will
be capitalized.) There are thus, by definition, no prominent syllables in the
proclitic and enclitic segments, as shown in (5).
5 Proclitic Tonic Enclitic
segment segment segment
he was GOing to GO
that’s a VERy TALL STOR y
it was a WED nesday
Prominence, then, is a linguistic choice available to the speaker which is
independent of both the grammatical structure of his utterance and the accents
of the citation forms of the constituent words. What then is its significance?
Let us consider the question/response pair in (6):
6 Q: Which card did you play?
R: // the QUEEN of HEARTS //
It is easy to see that in the response the word ‘of is the only word that could
occupy the place between ‘queen’ and ‘hearts’. If we think of each word as
representing a selection from a set of words available at successive slots,
then at the slot filled by ‘of’ there is a set of one. In this respect it can be
compared with the slots filled by ‘queen’ and ‘hearts’. The total range of
possibilities is presented in (7):