Abstract
INTRODUCTION
This note records two episodes in which an English boy aged approximately 8 years made spontaneous metalinguistic comments on English intonation. In the first episode, at 7;10 years, he offered a comprehensive and revealing analysis of the changed interpretation which would have been associated with a particular English sentence had the location of nuclear accent been altered. His analysis, which explicitly concerns focus assignment, is not only accurate but strikingly similar in method to the type of explanation used by linguists, e.g. (1) he specifically includes reference to prior spoken context and (2) he makes use of a variable to replace the focused material in the sentence. Further, the sentence which forms the starting point for the discussion is a somewhat complex type in which the all-focus interpretation requires the nuclear accent to be placed on the subject NP of an embedded sentence. The episode establishes that this fact was known to a younger brother (aged 5;4 years).