Prospective and implied givenness
It is not only repeated words that tend not to be accented, but also words that are about to be repeated. Compare (ii) with the unmarked pattern in (i):
(ii) a 'red triangle | and a 'blue triangle.
Accentuation and tonicity depend on the speaker's mental planning. The tonicity in (ii) implies that this sequence of two IPs was planned as a complete unite in advance. If, on the other hand, the speaker utters the first IP while he has still not yet planned the second IP, then for the same words we get an alternative pattern, (iii):
If these words were uttered as a single IP rather than being spread over two, we would still have the same difference between (i) and (ii):
a ▸red triangle and a 'blue triangle
》 (i) She's ▸much too 'busy.
》 (ii) She's ▸much to busy.
Here is another example, one that I witnessed. A taxi-driver was picking up two passengers who had a lot of luggage. The driver loaded most of the cases into the boot (trunk) of the car, but could not find room for the last one. So he finally placed it on the back seat. One passenger said to the other:
The placement of the nucleus on that, leaving problem to go in the tail, can be interpreted as implying that life is a succession of problems. The speaker treats the notion of problem as giving ( and implies a contrast between that problem and other problems: seeIn this way the speaker can use nucleus placement to indicate what part of the information is to be taken as old, givin, mutually agreed, and what part can be taken as new, fresh, additional. The speaker's decisions may not always agree with objective reality. This can be used for comic effect:
If someone has been doing a number of foolish things, you might greet the latest foolishness with:
which implies that you have already been querying her previous actions (what's she done), since by your intonation you treat them as givin, not new.