Herb,
I think there are default positions, and it has been laid out. Halliday at least says that tonal stress tends to fall on the last lexical elements in the clause. One problem might be that a linguist feels constrained about proclaiming one text more effective than another, but the ear certainly hears it.
    Have you seen "No country for Old Men?"
    "Yes, I have seen it twice." The emphasis here is on "yes" (marked theme) and "twice" (clause ending prominence.)
    "Yes, twice I have seen it" sounds awkward precisely because the clause ends with given information, not new information, so there's a disjunct between form (tonal prominence) and salience. The reader tries to put default emphasis on "it" or "seen". The second feels wordy even though the words are the same.
    "Give me liberty or give me death." Compare that to "give me liberty or death should be given." Or even "give me liberty or death." The first portions emphasis out in two spots, the second is discordant, and the third reduces tonal emphasis to one.
   "These are the times that try men's souls" is much better than "the times that try men's souls are these."
   Writing tends to load more information into a clause. (Halliday calls it "lexically dense".) Much of the pressure comes on the nominal groups. But there's no question that lexical density severely impacts readability. That's the argument Christensen makes against the sentence combining advocates who see lexical density as a sign of "mature style." The free modifier adds an intonation group. (Not his term, but it wasn't available to him at the time.) It's a very detail rich way of writing, but also very accessible. Counting it as part of the main clause can be misleading.

Craig

STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:

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Craig, This is generally a reasonable description of some of the relationships between intonation, structure, and punctuation. As a functionalist, I'm surprised you didn't add some comments on information loading as well. The one point I'd disagree with is your reference to default intonation. I don't think there is such a thing. A default intonation pattern presupposes that there are default distributions of information, and we don't know enough about discourse production to define that notion. Herb -----Original Message----- From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list"

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