The option that contains an independent clause is the last example - While the team made their play, the frenzied crowd cheered them to victory. The independent clause here would be <em>the frenzied crowd cheered them to victory. </em>
The area of semantics that studies word meanings as they occur in grammatical structures is linguistic semantics.
Pitch is how high or low a sound goes; what tone it has. Stress is where the emphasis is on a word. So yes, both are type of inflection. They're variances in the<span> way you shape words.</span>