STRESS SHIFT IN DUTCH AS A RHETORICAL DEVICE

It is demonstrated that one of the stress shift rules of Dutch, which is comparable to the iambic reversal rule in English, is sensitive to rhetoricity of style: subjects applied the rule more frequently as a greater degree of rhetoricity was elicited from them. Of a number of other factors that were hypothesized to have an influence on the rule, the distance between preshift and postshift accent positions is shown to have a significant effect.