Discussion Details
| Title: | Word Stress—Existence at Stake? |
| Submitter: | Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay |
| Description: | Traditionally, in Phonetics as well as in Linguistics, stress of words is
to be attested before going to analyze sentential intonation. What is "word" really, especially in this type of pre-lexical studies? Is it not mere truism that the "word" is a culture-specific concept, which has only visual representation? There is no such representation in the game of speaking. A literate speaking subject, in his/her printing culture, has only a visual sensation of word. If word is to be defined as a something (visual black or any other colored figure) in between two (white or any other colors) spaces (grounds), the boundaries of word depend on the particular literate community’s way of manipulating blank (or, one may call it as "other" spaces) spaces in their printing/writing. The boundaries/spaces as defined by traditional morphology, do not exist when a speaking subject is engaged in a discourse. At that moment of speaking, from the subject’s position, it is not word -stress, but it is rather a harmonic intonation of a discourse, which s/he is expressing as a continuum without ontologically being conscious about the grammarians’ order of things (different levels of language, viz. phoneme, morpheme, word, phrase, sentence…). As word does not exist, the word-stress is also an absentee at the moment of speaking. The memory of these blank spaces may also influence the way of speaking of a literate speaker. It is meaningless to account stress by isolating a ‘word’( which is actually a citation form as it is lemmatized in the dictionary produced by the print capitalism) from the speech continuum. Thus, the typological differences (as designated in the order Polysynthetic, Synthetic, Agglutinating and Analytic languages) of languages on the basis of word-morpheme ratio hold no water at all if we do not consider the literate culture-specificity of something called word. What do you think about this problem? How do you consider tonal languages, if the above statement is to be considered as "true"? |
| Date Posted: | 12-Jul-2006 |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
Linguistic Theories
Morphology Phonetics Phonology Lexicography |
| LL Issue: | 17.2042 |
| Posted: | 12-Jul-2006 |
