What does ACCENT mean in American English?

[Dennis R. Preston]

One would grant Ron that accent has several non-pronuciation senses,
and one would certainly grant that a careful investigation of
discourses will turn up multiplicities of meaning not seen out of
context. But I would also argue that these meanings here are all
rather "marked," at least in the limited context given (althoujgh I
also agree with Ron that a "markedness slip" - we'll now hear no
doubt that Ron and I are the first to use that heady phrase - could
have occurred).

My main point here, however, is to note that from hours and hours
(and hours) of our folk linguistic recordings (with full contexts,
many reported on concerning just this topic in Niedzielski and
Preston 1999, Folk LInguistics, Mouton de Gruyter) we do indeed find
that "pronunciation" is the primary sense of "accent" for
nonlinguists (although expansion of this to include other aspects of
language - lexicon, grammar) is also common.

dInIs

>In a message dated 9/14/2001 12:17:44 PM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:
>
><< >>"The only reason I am dropping the class is because of the teacher. I
>>   >don't like her accent."
>>   >
>The only way I can take the above is the phonological one; I can't
>imagine in being used anywhere I've lived to refer to the content,
>focus, or direction of the course "she" teaches.
>
>Larry
>  >>
>
>Think again, Larry, about what people do in actual conversations!
>
>See NEW OXFORD DICTIONARY OF ENGLISH, s.v. ACCENT, "3. a special or
>particular emphasis: _the accent is on participation_."
>
>I don't have time to do a web search, but I'd guess one could find examples
>of this pretty easily. I will grant you that general ACCENT is not used this
>way without some explicitly defining context. However, as I'm sure Larry
>knows (!), a snippet of conversation divorced from the rest of the
>conversation may well divorce the snippet from the explicitly defining
>context that was implicitly understood by the participants in the
>conversation.
>
>I'd even go farther and suggest that, even if this sense of ACCENT had not
>been explicitly defined by the parties in the conversation, the speaker could
>well have assumed that it was implicit (if she believed that her friend would
>not believe that mere pronunciation would drive her away from a class).
>
>I'd even go farther than that and suggest that, given that the above
>definition of ACCENT is common to native speakers of American English, the
>speaker was at worst making a very low-level performance error such as is
>frequently common in  actual conversation, i.e., using a word in one of its
>"marked" senses in a context where it would be most likely to be construed in
>its unmarked or default sense.
>
>Finally, I'm not totally sure that for anyone other than a linguist ACCENT is
>so strongly associated with 'pronunciation' as its default meaning.

--
Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736