I've increasingly been noticing (and swearing under my breath), as I listen to radio news announcers (alas! even on NPR!) who sort of automatically accent adjectives, regardless of the meaning of the phrase in scripted news item. This announcement behavior seems to be
getting more and more common.

Just at the moment I don't come up with a quote from a live broadcast, but I'll expatiate on the problem just the same.

Suppose you've been dreaming, you awake and see "a green tree", and you're confused or surprised. Now, suppose your dream was one of the following:

1. You'd dreamed of a forest killed by a great drought. So "a GREEN tree". The color is significant.

2. You'd dreamed of wandering in the gasping sands of the Sahara desert. Those words, to be disconcerting, should probably be spoken as "a green TREE".

In general, to accent an adjective is called for if the noun that follows is one of a class of objects or events which have been alluded to, so that the adjective is meant to distinguish the referent from the rest of the understood class. In the case of "a green TREE" in the desert, the word "green" is of very limited meaning; "TREE" is the significant factor in view of the dream.

The drought-killed forest of dream 2, on the other hand, would be gray, or brown, or leafless, so to wake to see a GREEN tree justifies an emphasis on "green".

Pedant mode OFF.

Dave Oesterreich