What does ACCENT mean in American English?

[Victoria Neufeldt]

I believe that the unmarked, basic meaning of 'accent' in the speech
community as a whole is the linguistic one.  I'd bet a week's pay that
virtually anyone encountering the word in isolation and asked what it meant
would say something about speech.  In the context under discussion, the fact
that the speaker says "her" (instead of "the") makes it pretty clear that
that must  have been the meaning here too.  It may not have been
specifically a geographical accent or even a non-English one that was
meant -- maybe just a dislike of the general way the teacher spoke that for
some reason grated on the student (who knows what personal associations
might be involved here).

Victoria

Victoria Neufeldt
1533 Early Drive
Saskatoon, Sask.
S7H 3K1
Canada



> On Friday, September 14, 2001 11:48 AM, RonButters writes:
> In a message dated 9/14/2001 12:17:44 PM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:
>
> 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.
>