Contrastive stress, contrariety, and focus

Prosodically acceptable speech must contain accents on appropriate words. This paper argues that many cases of accenting can be accounted for neither by a theory of given and new information nor by one that looks for syntactic and/or semantic parallelism. An account is attempted which uses the notion of contrariety, originating from traditional logic, and states, roughly speaking, that contrastive stress is required between sentences which stand in the relation of contrariety, modulo certain 'identifying' substitutions.