§ =7.= With regard to the function which it discharges in connected speech, we may classify accent or stress under four different categories. First comes what may be called the syntactical accent, which marks the logical importance of a word in relation to other words of the sentence. In a sentence like 'the birds are singing', the substantive 'birds' has, as denoting the subject of the sentence, the strongest accent; next in logical or syntactical importance comes the word 'singing', denoting an activity of the subject, and this has a comparatively strong accent; the auxiliary 'are' being a word of minor importance is uttered with very little force of voice; the article 'the', being the least emphatic or significant, is uttered accordingly with the slightest perceptible stress of all.
Secondly, we have the rhetorical accent, or as it might be called, the subjective accent, inasmuch as it depends upon the emphasis which the speaker wishes to give to that particular word of the sentence which he desires to bring prominently before the hearer. Thus in the sentence, 'you have done this,' the rhetorical accent may fall on any of the four words which the speaker desires to bring into prominence, e.g. '_yóu_ (and no one else) have done this,' or 'you _háve_ done this (though you deny it), or you have _dóne_ this' (you have not left it undone), or, finally, 'you have done _thís_' (and not what you were told). This kind of accent could also be termed the emphatic accent.
Thirdly, we have the rhythmical accent, which properly speaking belongs to poetry only, and often gives a word or syllable an amount of stress which it would not naturally have in prose, as, for instance, in the following line of _Hamlet_ (III. iii. 27)--
_My lord, he's going to his mother's closet_,
the unimportant word 'to' receives a stronger accent, due to the influence of the rhythm, than it would have in prose. Similarly in the following line of Chaucer's _Troilus and Cryseide_, l. 1816--
the inflexional syllable _es_ was certainly not ordinarily pronounced with so much stress as it must have here under the influence of the accent as determined by the rhythm of the line. Or again the word 'writyng', in the following couplet of Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_ (Prol. 325-6)--
