Comments on: Knowing One’s Place

By: Candy Canes « Literal-Minded

Candy Canes « Literal-Minded — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 05:57:49 +0000

[...] true syntactic phrases. The problem with taking that line is that there are minimal pairs such as Elm Street and Elm Avenue that have different stress patterns even though their meaning is almost identical, and to say that [...]

By: ACW

ACW — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 14:03:00 +0000

In the sixty seconds that I have devoted to introspection, I have convinced myself that the street-type descriptor must be stressed with the lone exception of street. This feels like a special case of the more general phenomenon of stressing the head: after all, Elm Avenue isn’t an elm, it’s an avenue. We also stress the head in “New York City”, “Boston Garden”, and “Lincoln Center”, though somehow “Fleet Center” gets anomalous left-stress. It reminds me of the famous case “white house” (head stress) versus “White House” (left stress). The conventional wisdom is that this left stressing can only happen in phrases that are more or less lexicalized.

My son plays the card game “Magic: The Gathering”, and deals with a set of thousands of named cards. Apparently among his crowd of Magic players, the custom is to left-stress the names of cards, with often weird results. A (hypothetical) card called “Thing of Beauty” would be pronounced “THING-of-beauty”. They also do this to acronyms like PTQ (Pro Tour Qualifier, a class of tournament), which they pronounce “PEE-tee-kyoo”.

By: Glen Whitman

Glen Whitman — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 03:42:00 +0000

I figure that ‘street’ is the most typical ending, so people stress any other ending to emphasize that it’s *not* ‘street’. This doesn’t fully explain your (Neal’s) dialect with regard to ‘place’, but apparently it works for others’. For me (Neal’s brother), ‘place’ sounds fine stressed or unstressed.

Also, I can think of some cases where the suffix gets equal stress. Specifically, in Washington, D.C., most people say “Mass Ave” with equal emphasis on both words. But when they say “Massachusetts Avenue,” I detect slightly more stress on ‘Avenue’.

By: irina

irina — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 18:29:00 +0000

Aren’t these incongruencies intriguing… Our associative power of observation makes us wonder why this rule doesn’t apply in all situations. I had never noticed that stress difference (I am not a native speaker), but it has reminded me that this is probably one of the things I most like about language…

By: AJD

AJD — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 08:21:00 +0000

Eh? In Monopoly it’s definitely Park PLACE. On the other hand, I always said “St. JAMES Place”.