These indications, moreover, cover normal utterance only; in emotional language or elocutionary delivery there are deliberate and arbitrary lengthenings and shortenings.[15]
Accent and Stress. The term accent may best be reserved for grammatical or dictionary accent—the greater emphasis placed according to standard usage upon one syllable of a word as compared with the others. Thus portion has an accent on the first syllable, material on the second, apprehension on the third, deliberation on the fourth. The other syllables are either unaccented, as the first of material and the second of portion, or have a secondary accent, as the second of deliberation.
Accent should be distinguished from stress, which is the rhythmical emphasis in a series of sounds. In prose the rhythmical stress is determined almost wholly by accent; in verse the two sometimes coincide and sometimes differ markedly.
In certain words whose accent is somewhat evenly divided between two syllables, and in certain combinations of monosyllables, there is a tendency to subject even grammatical accent to rhythmical stress. Hence the common pronunciations Newfoundland, Hawthornden; the alternation of stress in poor old man, sad hurt heart; and the shift of accent in "In a Chinese restaurant the waiters are Chinese."
Pitch. Pitch is a very uncertain and variable phenomenon. For the most part it is an ornament or aid to simple language rhythms, but under some conditions it plays an important rôle which cannot be neglected. Because of the physical structure of the vocal organs pitch is constantly changing in spoken discourse, though often the changes are not readily perceptible. Usually it coincides with accent.[16] It is also a frequent but by no means regular means of intensifying accent: compare "That was done simply" (normal utterance) with "That was simply wonderful" (intensive utterance). On the other hand pitch and accent sometimes clash: compare "The idea is good" (normal utterance) with "The idea!" (exclamatory). Other examples of pitch as a significant factor in prose are: "One should not say 'good' but 'goodly,' not 'brave' but 'bravely'"; "Not praise but praising gives him delight."[17]
Another aspect of pitch is that which in the rhetorics is usually called inflection. A question is uttered with rising inflection, that is, with a higher pitch at the end. Declarative sentences usually have a falling inflection just before the final period, that is, a lower pitch. Exclamations often have a circumflex inflection, as "Really!" spoken in a sarcastic tone; that is, the pitch rises and falls.
Experimental attempts to indicate variations of pitch by our common musical notation are given by Verrier. A single example will suffice here.[18]
Perhaps the most important aspect of pitch from the point of view of rhythm is its actual influence upon accent. We say naturally: "He was fifteen years old"; but place the numeral for emphasis at the end of the sentence and it receives a kind of pitch accent: "His age was fifteen." Compare also Chinese and Chinese in the example above.