Date:  Fri, 10 Nov 1995 09:08:48 -0500

From:  Wayne Glowka <wglowka[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MAIL.GAC.PEACHNET.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



I don't have the whole sentence available in my personal RAM. As I noted

to Joan in a private post, I'm wondering if the pronunciation was perhaps a

ditto-head joke that I just didn't catch.



By the way, I'm glad those students out there think we're weird. My

students derived great fun out of the folk/foke problem for the first

thirty pages. The last forty pages or so just about killed them.



Wayne Glowka

Professor of English

Director of Research and Graduate Student Services

Georgia College

Milledgeville, GA 31061

912-453-4222

wglowka[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]mail.gac.peachnet.edu