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Question

Difficulty: HardEmphatic Stress

Complete the contrastive question by supplying the word that correctly challenges the stressed element in the given statement.

Answer:Statement: The lead geologist VOLUNTARILY surveyed the remote volcanic crater last month.

Contrastive Question: Did the lead geologist 【reluctantly】 survey the remote volcanic crater last month?

Answer

The word required to fill the blank is 'reluctantly' (or another antonymous adverb such as 'involuntarily' or 'compulsorily'), which directly contrasts with the emphasized word 'VOLUNTARILY'.
In Oral English emphatic stress conventions, capitalizing 'VOLUNTARILY' indicates that contrastive focus is placed specifically on the manner in which the surveying was done. To elicit this emphatic statement, the contrastive question must introduce an opposing adverb (such as 'reluctantly' or 'involuntarily') in place of the stressed word while keeping the subject, verb predicate, direct object, and temporal modifier completely unchanged.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the word receiving emphatic stress in the statement.
The capitalized word is 'VOLUNTARILY', an adverb of manner.
Emphatic stress isolates the specific piece of information being emphasized or contrasted in an utterance.
2
Determine the required function of the contrastive question.
The question must query or contradict ONLY the manner of action expressed by 'VOLUNTARILY' while keeping all other sentence components identical.
In emphatic stress, the correct context-eliciting question differs from the statement solely at the point of emphasis.
3
Select an appropriate contrasting lexical item for the blank.
Substituting 'reluctantly' (or 'involuntarily') creates an exact contrastive question that elicits the response statement.
Asking whether the action was done reluctantly prompts the emphatic response that it was performed VOLUNTARILY.

Key Concept

Emphatic stress places contrastive focus on a single element of a sentence. The correct contrastive question challenges only that capitalized element using an opposing term while retaining all other syntactic and lexical components.
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Topics

Emphatic Stress

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