ABSTRACT
The term emphasis comprehends the many methods of putting extra stress on a sound, word, phrase or idea so as to give prominence to it. Emphasis may involve choices from all areas of the language and its effect may depend on a statistical change (e.g. regular increased volume, a ten percent increase in the number of negatives per paragraph) or on an unquantifiable impression created by a writer. In Dylan Thomas’s phrase ‘a grief ago’, for example, there is no way of measuring mathematically the increased prominence given to ‘grief by its unexpected collocation.
