Fallacy of accent

Last updated

The fallacy of accent (also known as accentus, from its Latin denomination, and misleading accent [1] ) is a verbal fallacy that reasons from two different vocal readings of the same written words. In English, the fallacy typically relies on prosodic stress, the emphasis given to a word within a phrase, or a phrase within a sentence. [1] [2] [3] The fallacy has also been extended to grammatical ambiguity caused by missing punctuation. [4]

Contents

History

Among the thirteen types of fallacies in his book Sophistical Refutations , Aristotle lists a fallacy he calls προσῳδία (prosody), later translated in Latin as accentus . [5] He gives as an example:

So where you lodge is a house? / Yes. (Ἆρά γ´ ἐστὶ τὸ οὗ καταλύεις οἰκία; Ναί.)

And isn't "you don't lodge" the negation of "you lodge"? / Yes. (Οὐκοῦν τὸ ‘οὐ καταλύεις’ τοῦ ‘καταλύεις’ ἀπόφασις; Ναί.)

And you said that where you lodge is a house. Therefore a house is a negation. (Ἔφησας δ´ εἶναι τὸ οὗ καταλύεις οἰκίαν· ἡ οἰκία ἄρα ἀπόφασις.)

The fallacy turns here on the varying pronunciation of ου, meaning "where" in the first and third occurrences, and "not" in the second. These would later be distinguished in writing with diacritics, but they were not in Aristotle's time. [5]

Aristotle noted that fallacies of this form were rare in contemporary Greek. They are rarer still in languages like English that have fewer heteronyms. Accordingly, English commentary has tended either to omit the fallacy or to reinterpret it as a fallacy of varying word emphasis. By varying the emphasis in "All men are created equal," for example, one might argue that men (not women) are created equal, or that men are created (but do not remain) equal. Broadening the fallacy in this manner has met with occasional criticism. [6]

See also

Related Research Articles

An irrelevant conclusion, also known as ignoratio elenchi or missing the point, is the informal fallacy of presenting an argument that may or may not be logically valid and sound, but fails to address the issue in question. It falls into the broad class of relevance fallacies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Argument from ignorance</span> Informal fallacy

Argument from ignorance, also known as appeal to ignorance, is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false or a proposition is false because it has not yet been proven true. This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes the possibility that there may have been an insufficient investigation to prove that the proposition is either true or false. It also does not allow for the possibility that the answer is unknowable, only knowable in the future, or neither completely true nor completely false. In debates, appealing to ignorance is sometimes an attempt to shift the burden of proof. The term was likely coined by philosopher John Locke in the late 17th century.

In classical rhetoric and logic, begging the question or assuming the conclusion is an informal fallacy that occurs when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion. Historically, begging the question refers to a fault in a dialectical argument in which the speaker assumes some premise that has not been demonstrated to be true. In modern usage, it has come to refer to an argument in which the premises assume the conclusion without supporting it. This makes it more or less synonymous with circular reasoning.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fallacy</span> Argument that uses faulty reasoning

A fallacy, is the use of invalid or otherwise faulty reasoning in the construction of an argument that may appear to be well-reasoned if unnoticed. The term was introduced in the Western intellectual tradition by the Aristotelian De Sophisticis Elenchis.

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 increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in tone. The terms stress and accent are often used synonymously in that context but are sometimes distinguished. For example, when emphasis is produced through pitch alone, it is called pitch accent, and when produced through length alone, it is called quantitative accent. When caused by a combination of various intensified properties, it is called stress accent or dynamic accent; English uses what is called variable stress accent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Double negative</span> Grammatical construction such as not nothing

A double negative is a construction occurring when two forms of grammatical negation are used in the same sentence. This is typically used to convey a different shade of meaning from a strictly positive sentence. Multiple negation is the more general term referring to the occurrence of more than one negative in a clause. In some languages, double negatives cancel one another and produce an affirmative; in other languages, doubled negatives intensify the negation. Languages where multiple negatives affirm each other are said to have negative concord or emphatic negation. Portuguese, Persian, French, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Greek, Spanish, Old English, Italian, Afrikaans, and Hebrew are examples of negative-concord languages. This is also true of many vernacular dialects of modern English. Chinese, Latin, German, Dutch, Japanese, Swedish and modern Standard English are examples of languages that do not have negative concord. Typologically, negative concord occurs in a minority of languages.

In linguistics, prosody is the study of elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments but which are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, stress, and rhythm. Such elements are known as suprasegmentals.

Homeric Greek is the form of the Greek language that was used in the Iliad, Odyssey, and Homeric Hymns. It is a literary dialect of Ancient Greek consisting mainly of Ionic, with some Aeolic forms, a few from Arcadocypriot, and a written form influenced by Attic. It was later named Epic Greek because it was used as the language of epic poetry, typically in dactylic hexameter, by poets such as Hesiod and Theognis of Megara. Compositions in Epic Greek may date from as late as the 5th century CE, and it only fell out of use by the end of classical antiquity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matthew 5:37</span>

Matthew 5:37 is the thirty-seventh verse of the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament and is part of the Sermon on the Mount. This verse is part of either the third or fourth antithesis, the final part of the discussion of oaths.

In linguistics, intonation is the variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression, to signal the illocutionary act performed by a sentence, or to regulate the flow of discourse. For example, the English question "Does Maria speak Spanish or French?" is interpreted as a yes-or-no question when it is uttered with a single rising intonation contour, but is interpreted as an alternative question when uttered with a rising contour on "Spanish" and a falling contour on "French". Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, its effects almost always work hand-in-hand with other prosodic features. Intonation is distinct from tone, the phenomenon where pitch is used to distinguish words or to mark grammatical features.

The grammar of Modern Greek, as spoken in present-day Greece and Cyprus, is essentially that of Demotic Greek, but it has also assimilated certain elements of Katharevousa, the archaic, learned variety of Greek imitating Classical Greek forms, which used to be the official language of Greece through much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Modern Greek grammar has preserved many features of Ancient Greek, but has also undergone changes in a similar direction as many other modern Indo-European languages, from more synthetic to more analytic structures.

Accentus is a Church music term.

Reification is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction is treated as if it were a concrete real event or physical entity. In other words, it is the error of treating something that is not concrete, such as an idea, as a concrete thing. A common case of reification is the confusion of a model with reality: "the map is not the territory".

In linguistics, a yes–no question, also known as a binary question, a polar question, or a general question, is a question whose expected answer is one of two choices, one that provides an affirmative answer to the question versus one that provides a negative answer to the question. Typically, in English, the choices are either "yes" or "no". Yes–no questions present an exclusive disjunction, namely a pair of alternatives of which only one is a felicitous answer. In English, such questions can be formed in both positive and negative forms

<i>Do</i>-support Using do in negated clauses, questions, and other constructions

Do-support, in English grammar, is the use of the auxiliary verb do, including its inflected forms does and did, to form negated clauses and questions as well as other constructions in which subject–auxiliary inversion is required.

Pitch accent is a term used in autosegmental-metrical theory for local intonational features that are associated with particular syllables. Within this framework, pitch accents are distinguished from both the abstract metrical stress and the acoustic stress of a syllable. Different languages specify different relationships between pitch accent and stress placement.

An expletive is a word or phrase inserted into a sentence that is not needed to express the basic meaning of the sentence. It is regarded as semantically null or a placeholder. Expletives are not insignificant or meaningless in all senses; they may be used to give emphasis or tone, to contribute to the meter in verse, or to indicate tense.

References

  1. 1 2 Damer, T. Edward (2009), Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-free Arguments (6th ed.), Wadsworth, pp. 126–128, ISBN   978-0-495-09506-4
  2. Fischer, D. H. (1970), Historians' Fallacies: Toward A Logic of Historical Thought, Harper torchbooks (first ed.), New York: HarperCollins, pp. 271–274, ISBN   978-0-06-131545-9, OCLC   185446787
  3. Engel, S. Morris (1994), Fallacies and Pitfalls of Language: The Language Trap, Courier Dover Publications, pp. 24–30, ISBN   978-0-486-28274-9
  4. Ruiz, Roberto (2019). "Accent". In Arp, Robert; Barbone, Steven; Bruce, Michael (eds.). Bad Arguments: 100 of the most important fallacies in Western Philosophy. Wiley Blackwell. pp. 241–246. ISBN   9781119167907.
  5. 1 2 Ebbesen, Sten (1981), Commentators and Commentaries on Aristotle's Sophistici Elenchi: A Study of Post-Aristotelian Ancient and Medieval Writings on Fallacies, Brill Archive, pp.  8, 81, 187–189, ISBN   90-04-06297-1
  6. Walton, Douglas (2013). Fallacies Arising from Ambiguity.