Neat explanation which reminded me of another tangent on emphasis. Does anyone remember ‘The Joy of Yiddish’ on BBC radion 4? The test was to go through the sentence ‘my wife bought tickets for the show’ putting the emphasis on each word in turn with each successive pass. Kept me amused for hours. Sorry, back to bread making … 
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I have a book with a similar title…“The J-OYs of Yiddish”. I don’t remember that particular programme, but I try to listen to the Michael Rosen programme “Word of Mouth”, all about words and language. In English, we can’t always change word order to give emphasis, but in speaking, we can use our voices, although it’s hard to convey this properly in writing.
I think it would be nice if Michael Rosen could do a programme on how we use our voices, as well as actual words, to convey subtle changes in meaning or emphasis. I think it could make a whole series actually, or PhD thesis or whatever.
(And possibly, in the context of language-learning, we should not just be listening to the words, but the way they are said, and from that we can probably pick up some of the meaning, even if we don’t exactly know the words).
[I have used italics there to (try to) convey emphasis, but you can do it much more subtly when speaking. Then there is the whole field of facial gestures, hand gestures and body language as a whole…]
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[quote=“mikeellwood, post:22, topic:4542”]
In English, we can’t always change word order to give emphasis, but in speaking, we can use our voices, although it’s hard to convey this properly in writing.
[/quote] indeed, fascinating stuff and I’m a big fan of Word of Mouth too. My West Riding grandad was a master vocal inflexion so, when asked by my Gran “What did you think of your tea, Frank?”, his usual reply of “Aye, it wer alreight” could convey anything between sublime and poisonous. Aye, well, mmm😉
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Then there is this line which is meaningless in print; you have to be able to hear it in your head:
There’s nothing like a bacon butty and this is nothing like a bacon butty.
And what about all the dialect words many of which don’t even sound right if said in a different accent? Having moved from west of the Pennines to the east side, a distance of only 30 miles, I often had to ask what words meant and, on the other hand, faced blank looks when I had used a word they didn’t know. There were dozens of these words eg I found that the children talked about ‘laking’ but had no clue what ‘gradely’ meant.
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