The fallacy of accent (also referred to as ''accentus'', from its Latin denomination, and misleading accent
) is a type of
ambiguity
Ambiguity is the type of meaning in which a phrase, statement or resolution is not explicitly defined, making several interpretations plausible. A common aspect of ambiguity is uncertainty. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement ...
that arises when the meaning of a sentence is changed by placing an unusual
prosodic stress,
or when, in a written passage, it is left unclear which word the emphasis was supposed to fall on.
Later writers have extended the fallacy to ambiguity caused in sentences due to grammar as well.
History
Among the thirteen types of fallacies in his book ''
Sophistical Refutations'',
Aristotle lists a fallacy he calls (''prosody''), later translated in Latin as ''
accentus''.
While the passage is considered obscure, it is commonly interpreted as referring to the ambiguity that emerges when a word can be mistaken for another by changing
suprasegmental phonemes, which in Ancient Greek correspond to
diacritics (accents and breathings).
Since words stripped from their diacritics do not exist in the Ancient Greek language, this notion of ''accent'' was troublesome for later commentators.
Whatever the interpretation, in the Aristotelian tradition the fallacy remains roughly confined to issues of
lexical stress
In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as i ...
. It is only later that the fallacy came to identify shifts in prosodic stress.
Example
''I'' didn't take the test yesterday. (Somebody else did.)
I ''didn't'' take the test yesterday. (I did not take it.)
I didn't ''take'' the test yesterday. (I did something else with it.)
I didn't take ''the'' test yesterday. (I took a different one.)
I didn't take the ''test'' yesterday. (I took something else.)
I didn't take the test ''yesterday''. (I took it some other day.)
See also
*
Innuendo
*
Quoting out of context
Quoting out of context (sometimes referred to as contextomy or quote mining) is an informal fallacy in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning. Contextomies may be either intentional o ...
*
Syntactic ambiguity
References
{{Fallacies
Ambiguity
Syntax
Verbal fallacies