Meaning change with emphasis shift

[David D. Robertson]

Hi,

For the mental exercise of it, I'm trying to think of any pair of words
there may be in Chinuk Wawa, differentiated by stress, that *doesn't come
from* one & the same root.  Nope, can't seem to think of any.  There may be
some such, but Colin's question brings up a good point--that stress was
used, most notably in the Grand Ronde variety of Jargon, in some cases to
create a new, semantically distinct word from an existing root.

Makes me wonder, however, whether 2 or more terms from separate sources,
that is, having meanings distinct from one another, might have been jointly
disfavored for *adoption into* the Jargon.  I mean, we might suspect it
would be a source of confusion in the "pidgin" stage of the language, for
(the suprasegmental) stress to be the only distinguishing mark between a
couple of words...since there was certainly a great deal of variation going
on among all speakers' Jargon, especially at earlier dates.  Once the
language became some people's native tongue, maybe it "stabilized" enough
that syllable stress could be added as a meaningful speech strategy.

But--we notice that syllable stress in Chinuk Wawa is mostly faithful to
what we find in each language that the various Jargon words came from.
This undermines my idea above!  Most of the donor languages do have
meaningful syllabic stress contrasts, don't they?  English (and thus the
Nootkan words that may have entered Jargon via English), Chinookan
languages, K'alapuyan, Salishan languages; but maybe not French, whose
stress applies to larger units than the word.  Cree and Ojibwe, like
Nootkan, may also lack the kind of meaningful stress contrast I'm
mentioning, with stress being predictable from the position of long vs.
short vowels & closed vs. open syllables (I am more than usually ignorant
of these languages).

And now, if you will pardon a list member's thinking out loud at such
length, it dawns on me that there are indeed words distinguished from each
other in Jargon by stress, that come from entirely different roots.  We
just need to look at monosyllables.  (Forgot about 'em for a minute!)  For
example, there's the historically attested /na/ (unstressed) yes/no
question particle, versus /nA/ (stressed) with a meaning like "here, take
it".

So this shoots Dave R's idea right down, but adds to the examples for Colin.

Moving on...Another example of contrast that we know, characteristic of
Grand Ronde, is /khApa/ (stress shown by capital letter) meaning "at",
versus /khapA/ meaning "there".  Given their locative sense, these are
presumably from the same root.