THEORY: two questions, and Ghent to Aix

And Rosta wrote:

> > >    I wonder who ate bread and what.
> >
> > I haven't been able to parse this yet. What's it supposed to mean?
>
> Something close to "I wonder who ate bread together with what". I
> agree it's not very good.
I get this meaning if I read it without contrastive stress on "who" vs. "what".
A more suggestive orthography might be "I wonder who ate bread'n'what."

ObDigression:

I was reading out loud to my daughter Robert Browning's poem "How They Carried The
Good News From Ghent To Aix",
(http://geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/2012/poems/brown01.html#3)
which begins with the lines:

        I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he:
        I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;
        "Good speed!" cried the watch as the gate-bolt undrew;
        "Speed" echoed the wall to us galloping through.

In this poem, written in Native Measure (see my earlier posting on this subject),
the stress accents are dominant, and the rhythm mimics the sound of galloping
horses.  The stresses are on "sprang", "stir-", "Jor-", "he"; "gal-", "gal-",
"gal-", "three"; "speed", "watch", "gate", "-drew"; "ech-", "wall", "gal-",
"through".  In performance, these cannot be lightly ignored, or the echoic
effect is lost.

However, in normal prose reading, there would be a contrastive stress on
"I", "Joris; "I", "Dirck", "all three".  I found myself in performance
giving these high pitch as a contrastive device, though pitch is not used
as such in English (at least not my English).  That led to the first
two lines coming out as (^ = high pitch, " = strong stress):

        ^I "sprang to the "saddle, and ^"Joris, and "he;
        ^I "galloped, ^Dirck "galloped, we galloped ^all ^three.

Likewise, "Speed" in the fourth line cannot bear a stress, but got high pitch
instead.  Considering that my normal speaking voice is nearly pitch-free even
by American standards (my wife describes it as a "monotone mumble"), this
seemed very striking to me, and I record it here.

Finally, on a syntactic note, observe the cataphoric use of "he" = "Dirck".

--

Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! || John Cowan <jcowan@...>
Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau,  || http://www.reutershealth.com
Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau,           || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Und trank die Milch vom Paradies.            -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)