Date:  Fri, 10 Nov 1995 08:05:33 -0500

From:  "Joan C. Cook" <cookj[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]GUSUN.ACC.GEORGETOWN.EDU>

Subject: Re: RhetORic



On Wed, 8 Nov 1995, Wayne Glowka wrote:



> On a quick ride to the Wal-Mart to get some anti-freeze a minute ago, I

> heard a caller from Wisconsin (I believe) tell Rush Limbaugh something

> about liberal rhetORic, with stress on the second syllable.



Dwight Bolinger (sorry, I don't have the exact reference handy, but I can

find it if you want it) claims that stress sometimes shifts toward the

end of a word for focus, but it depends on the word's position in the

sentence. If that's right, your Rush fan might be producing this kind of

shift to meet the rhetorical demands of the moment, instead of

demonstrating a feature of dialect. But of course you'd have to

have the whole sentence to be able to take a stab at that analysis.



--Joan



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Joan C. Cook                       Imagination is

Department of Linguistics                more important

Georgetown University                  than knowledge.

Washington, D.C., USA

cookj[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]gusun.georgetown.edu              --Albert Einstein

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