Accent
Roberto Ruiz
Peter Ustinov retraces a journey made by Mark Twain a century ago. The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.
Quoted in Joseph Piercy, The 25 Rules of Grammar
I bet you didn’t know that Nelson Mandela was an 800-year-old demigod and dildo collector, right? Let’s do a little experiment: read the quoted passage again, but this time add a mental comma after demigod, and see what happens. I’ll wait... Interesting, right? Now it becomes clear that the tour included encounters with three separate people: (a) Nelson Mandela, (b) an 800-year-old demigod, and (c) a dildo collector.
Accent is a fallacy of pragmatics. In linguistics and semiotics, pragmatics refers to the study of how speech is used and the ways that context contributes to meaning. Contrary to popular belief, words alone are often insufficient to precisely and unambiguously determine the meaning of a sentence or utterance. To make such precise determinations, we usually rely on additional non- linguistic cues, such as knowledge of local history and customs, inferences about other people’s mental states, tone of voice, facial expressions, body language, gestures, analogical and symbolic reasoning, relationships between signified and signifier, fluctuations in lexical stress (the vocal stress placed on syllables within words), variations in prosodic stress (the vocal stress placed
on words within sentences), and various other inferences and forms of background knowledge. Consider the text from a common street sign:
SLOW
CHILDREN AT PLAY
At first glance, this sign appears simply to warn drivers to slow down their vehicles in order to reduce the risk of accidentally running over children who are playing in the vicinity. Notice, however, that this is partly the result of the way in which we read the sign, namely with an implicit pause between slow and children at play.
If we take away the pause, however, we get something closer to the sentence, “Slow children at play,” with the implication - which we did not have before—that the children are slow. Perhaps this difference can be made even clearer if we write the sentence and include a comma:SLOW,
CHILDREN
AT PLAY
If you look back at the street sign, you’ll notice that there is no comma anywhere on it; it is simply assumed that those reading the sign will have at least a basic understanding of the local, cultural, and legal background under which it is to be interpreted as a warning to motorists to drive slowly, and not as a description of the mental or physical ability of the children in question.
The fallacy of accent takes place, therefore, when a premise in an argument seems to rely for its meaning on one possible vocal emphasis, but a conclusion is drawn that relies on an extrapolation from a different vocal emphasis of the same phrase. Such ambiguities are often the result of unacknowledged differences in background beliefs, attitudes, and expectations that people may implicitly bring to the reading of a passage. These differences in context would lead the person drawing the erroneous inference to place the pause, vocal stress, or emphasis on a different part of the sentence from that originally intended, thereby producing a different line of reasoning.
Although it will not cover all cases of accent, the use of proper and careful punctuation can go a long way towards reducing unnecessary confusion and ambiguity. Consider this sentence: “A woman without her man is nothing.” Given your own beliefs, values, life experience, and cultural background, you are probably interpreting it to mean something very specific and unambiguous. However, depending on how you punctuate it, you could actually end up with at least two diametrically opposed meanings: (a) A woman, without her man, is nothing; (b) A woman: without her, man is nothing.
The fallacy, then, was committed in the original sentence because, as it stands - with no punctuation marks other than the period at the end - it gives us no context to understand its intended meaning, and it is therefore open to different prosodic stresses when read out loud, and hence to different interpretations.
If it looked like either its second or its third iteration, its punctuation would probably be enough to give us the context to understand it unambiguously, and no fallacy would occur.Below, on the left-hand column, we have a few more examples that illustrate some of the ways in which the absence of proper punctuation can produce instances of the fallacy of accent, and, on the right, how the misleading ambiguity of said passages can be minimized or eliminated with some context-sensitive punctuation.
| For my parents, Ayn Rand and God. | For my parents, Ayn Rand, and God. |
| Let’s eat grandma. | Let’s eat, grandma. |
| Most of the time travelers worry about their luggage. | Most of the time, travelers worry about their luggage. |
| All fields are closed. No trespassing violators will be prosecuted. | All fields are closed. No trespassing. Violators will be prosecuted. |
| Don’t wear green people. | Don’t wear green, people. |
To make matters worse, and especially in our digital age of texting, people often forego the use of any punctuation at all. Consider the following excerpt from a letter sent by a reader to the BBC News (2006), with most of its punctuation omitted:
Dear Mother-in-Law it was a shame you had to stay here for such a short time I thought I might have coped but it was unbearable seeing you leave the relief was immense when I heard we might see you again soon I wanted to end it all by saying goodbye now I hope I will not have to say it to you again for a long time if you have the opportunity to spend Christmas elsewhere next year please do not much love Matthew
Depending on how the letter is punctuated, we could read it either as a very warm and affectionate expression of appreciation and concern or as a not so welcoming note:
Dear Mother-in-Law,
It was a shame you had to stay here for such a short time.
I thought I might have coped, but it was unbearable seeing you leave. The relief was immense when I heard we might see you again soon. I wanted to end it all by saying goodbye now. I hope I will not have to say it to you again for a long time. If you have the opportunity to spend Christmas elsewhere next year, please do not.Much love,
Matthew
Dear Mother-in-Law,
It was a shame you had to stay here. For such a short time, I thought I might have coped, but it was unbearable. Seeing you leave, the relief was immense. When I heard we might see you again soon, I wanted to end it all. By saying goodbye now, I hope I will not have to say it to you again for a long time. If you have the opportunity to spend Christmas elsewhere next year, please do.
Not much love,
Matthew
In addition to questions of vocal emphasis and proper punctuation, a given passage or utterance can sometimes only be understood when set in its proper context, which helps to establish the sense in which it was originally intended. The fallacy of accent can also be committed, therefore, when a passage is quoted without its original context, and erroneous inferences are drawn based on this (often deliberate) distortion.
A classic example of this kind of deliberate form of quote mining is often used by creationists in their attempt to discredit Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. To make the case that no sensible person in full possession of her faculties could believe in such a theory, creationists sometimes quote Darwin himself in On the Origin of Species (1859/2006):
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. (569)
What the quoted passage does not include, however, is the rest of the paragraph in question, which goes on to explain the precise conditions under which such an apparently absurd sequence is not only possible but, in Darwin’s view, perhaps quite inevitable:
Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.
(569)Context is crucial to the proper interpretation and understanding of linguistic utterances, and a careful thinker ought to keep in mind the possibility of drawing potentially misleading interpretations from a passage if no attention is given to possible differences in context, intention, vocal emphasis, and punctuation. In fact, we should keep in mind that even the literal truth can sometimes be used to deceive or mislead. In explaining some of the differences between British and American conceptions of justice, for instance, Tom Cowan (1996, 74) tells the story of a sea captain confronted with the question of what to do about a mate whose love for the bottle was getting out of control. At last, after one too many mishaps, the captain had no choice but to state on the ship’s log: “The mate was drunk today.” The mate wasn’t too pleased with this turn of events, and so on a day when it was his turn to write on the ship’s log, he took his revenge and recorded on the log: “The captain was sober today!”
References
BBC News. 2006. “Saying Thank You in Style.” BBC News, January 5. http://news. bbc.co.uk∕1∕hi∕magazine∕4583594.stm (accessed September 29, 2017).
Cowan, Tom K. 1996. “Are Truth and Fairness Generally Acceptable?” In Readings in True and Fair, edited by R.H. Parker, P.W. Wolnizer, and C.W. Nobes. 1996. New York, NY: Garland Publishing, 74-80.
Darwin, Charles. 1859/2006. On the Origin of Species. From So Simple a Beginning - The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin, edited by Edward O. Wilson. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
Piercy, Joseph. 2014. The 25 Rules of Grammar: The Essential Guide to Good English. London: Michael O’Mara.