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I'm looking for examples of phrases & sentences whose meaning changes depending on the tone of voice used.

For example,

'Follow me.' (Said with a falling tone) would be understood as a command.

'Follow me?' (Said with a rising tone) would be understood as a question (ie. do you understand me?)

The longer and more grammatically correct the better!

Darren
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    Voting to close as "not constructive". Virtually any statement can be converted to a question using rising inflection. – FumbleFingers Dec 02 '11 at 17:14
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    Lists of examples are not good questions for his site. – Mitch Dec 02 '11 at 17:16
  • @Mitch see this question (one of the top voted on the site), and this open question – yoozer8 Dec 02 '11 at 17:20
  • Although I must admit the first link there does have the "locked question" disclaimer. – yoozer8 Dec 02 '11 at 17:21
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    @Jim: I was under the impression that, despite those two particular questions (which have come up in meta-discussions), list-like questions are not wanted here. I agree totally with FumbleFingers in that this one is particularly vaguely open-ended. – Mitch Dec 02 '11 at 17:24
  • @Mitch I agree, but I think it could produce some interesting responses, so I'd like to give it a short time before closing. – yoozer8 Dec 02 '11 at 17:27
  • My favorite: "These are the toys I have to play with." Depending on the way it's pronounced, it can mean the toys you must play with or the toys available for you to play with. – David Schwartz Dec 02 '11 at 19:10
  • @David Schwartz: I like that one too (Peter Shor's comment to PPL's answer). Not least because you can't indicate that meaning change in writing just by italicising have. It hinges on the have/haff distinction. – FumbleFingers Dec 02 '11 at 19:15

2 Answers2

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Practically all sentences have different meanings, or at least different intrepretations, when spoken with different stress and intonation patterns. Every native speaker realizes this.

Most Garden Path sentences, for instance, while disturbingly difficult to process in written form, pose no troubles at all in speech, because stress and intonation differentiates them effectively. Some examples:

  • The man who hunts ducks out on weekends.
  • The dog that I had really loved bones.

English orthography does not represent stress or intonation in any consistent way, and therefore has to resort to all kinds of artificial and ill-understood subterfuges, like punctuation, to try to represent at least a bit of it. The result is as you see.

John Lawler
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Won't you forget it?

(normal question tone) Are you sure you will remember?

(angry tone, maybe kind-a question-y depending on the speaker) Drop it!

yoozer8
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  • Negated or not, I expect most sentences starting with variants of can, will, etc. toggle between actual query and demand/put-down depending on intonation. Can we leave it at that. (? :) – FumbleFingers Dec 02 '11 at 19:26