I ordered COFfee, but the waiter brought me TEA.
A: Oh, I see you bought a new CAR.
B: No, I didn’t BUY it. I only RENTed it.
Disagreeing and correcting
When we want to disagree with someone or correct a mistake
that we hear, we can give prominence to the incorrect item
and the correction. We can think of this as a kind of
contrastive stress, emphasizing a di"erence between the
incorrect and correct information or between what you think
and what I think.
A: Isn’t Los Angeles is the capital of CaliFORNia?
B: No, it’s not Los ANGeles; it’s SacraMENTo.
A: This soup is too HOT!
B: It seems COLD to me.
A: No, I mean SPICy hot, not TEMPerature hot.
These ways of using prominence to show emphasis, contrast,
or disagreement are very common in English, but prominence
may not be used to mark these things in other languages;
word order or grammatical forms may be used instead.
Because of this, it’s important for students to learn and
practice using prominence and intonation to indicate words
that they want to emphasize when speaking.Prominence changes meaning
If we change the word that has prominence in a sentence, our
understanding of the speaker’s intention or meaning can
change, too. Even though the basic grammar and vocabulary
stay the same, the speaker’s purpose and the meaning he/she
wants to convey can be very di"erent. Look at these
examples:Emma said she lost her KEYS again.
(Standard prominence. I’m just reporting a fact.)EMMA said she lost her keys again.
(Emma said it, not anyone else.)Emma SAID she lost her keys again.
(She said it, but I’m not sure I believe it.)Emma said SHE lost her keys again.
(No one else lost them; she did it herself.)133