(Oh) for ____!

When I was living in North Dakota I heard the phrase 'for cute!' alot. (Never in reference to me of course.) I understood it to be close in meaning to 'that's (so) cute!' or 'how cute!' or something along those lines. I heard it from teenagers to forty-somethings. From the Dakotas and Minnesota. I was going to write about this a while ago, but I'm glad I put it off.

Since I don't remember hearing 'for ____' with anything other than cute filling the blank, I was thinking that it was a single idiomatic phrase and not a productive construction. The only variation I heard was the occasional 'Oh!' introducing the exclamation. Not relevant.

That's why programs like Antiques Roadshow are so wonderful.

A couple weeks ago I was watching, enjoying all the Northern Prairie/Upper Midwestern dialect features from the show's stopover in Bismarck. Plenty of open Os, defricated dentals, raised pre-velars, and yah you betchas. Unfortunately I didn't hear any ufdahs. That was one of my favorites.

But during the closing credits two treasure hopers were whooping about the good time they had. For fun! said one. For neat! said the other. And earlier today, when I mentioned elsewhere that I want to be recycled when I die, a North Dakotan friend commented That's icky. For gross.

So if we know that 'for ____' is productive, the next step is to find out what constraints there are on productivity. It looks like adjectives fit in the blank. But all adjectives? Semantically it looks like the adjectives are more likely to be those of judgement and quality. It's not very likely that someone would say 'Oh, how pleated!' unless they find pleats particularly exciting. Similarly I wouldn't expect to hear something like 'for transparent!' or 'for polished!' even though there's really no syntactic constraint. But for all you Northern Prairie/Upper Midwest speakers: are there any adjectives that wouldn't fit in the blank?

McWhorter on Obama's address

Obama won because he pronounces it historih. That's a flat oversimplification of John McWhorter's short essay at The New Republic.

But it is an interesting piece. Consider McWhorter's claim that

Black English is a matter not just of slang, but of sentence structure and sound (why you can tell most black people's race over the phone, which is proven in studies).

I'm no mindreader, but I assume he mentioned studies in anticipation of those who would think such claims of 'hearing' race are based mostly on prejudice. One major introductory linguistics text includes in a list of language myths: You can almost always recognize someone's background by the way he talks.

Of course McWhorter's claim isn't so wide. It's true that some dialect markers are very apparent. It's also true that some regions and backgrounds and cultures have distinct dialects. I remember that during the first OJ Simpson trial one witness claimed to hear a black man talking. OJ's defense team jumped on this claim saying that it was impossible to tell race by sound.

And that's true. But McWhorter could easily defend his claim with nuance. First of all, "most" is very different from "almost always." He might also agree that dialect markers are circumstantial evidence. And tho I don't know the studies he's referencing,* I imagine there is a correlation that makes the case defensible: that from hearing only speech, some inferences are easier to make than others. And tho our ears might alert us to details that sometimes serve as clues, that doesn't mean they give us knowledge of race.

He's obviously thinking about this, writing later in the article:

It is not uncommon to hear a group of teenagers speaking in Black English, and find when they pass by that they are actually Latino, Asian, or with the cohort under about 25, white.

McWhorter is well-informed about the history of this language. I'm on the fence about his politics, but his linguistic scholarship is reliable. I don't fussily discard his statement regarding "pitch" in speech when he observes that Obama often ends sentences on a higher pitch than, say, Tom Brokaw would. It's probably true since Tom Brokaw often speaks with a very low voice and the frequency is going to be lower just because he sounds like a bass and Obama... maybe a baritone. But I assume McWhorter is talking about the more important feature of tone or contour.

When he suggests that Obama, in saying responsibility, used pitch and pronunciation in a way that is warp and woof of the grammar of, for example, his father's native language Luo, I'm more interested than skeptical.

---

* see comments

BBC's myth-take on dialects

Tenser, said the Tensor posted a couple weeks back on the BBC presentation of How the Edwardians Spoke. His post does a fine job of going over some of the laughable claims made by program host Joan Washington.

It's an hour long so if you have the time you should watch it. And just for the record: it is an enjoyable hour even tho Ms Washington peppers it with ridiculous conjecture and baffling superstitions. The recordings are fascinating. And occasionally touching.

Watch the Google™ video or the GUBA video (better quality). Both are downloadable.

A few parts that stuck with me:

◊ At about 15:00 when told that the Germans made these tapes with the intention of using the data to learn native British dialects she reacts with what strikes me as an incredibly patronizing "Do you...Do you...Do you surmise that? Do you guess that? Or do you know that?"

Her disfluency strikes me as indicative of a sudden discomfort. I don't think she believes Jürgen-Kornelius Mahrenholz. She has been leaning in towards him and as soon as she starts asking she backs away. My instinct tells me that she's aware that there's aggression in her question and she's padding it by her slight retreat. Notice that when he tells her that there is documentation of the fact her cheeky smile fades slightly. (She might not be used to people being able to actually back up their claims.) But I'm no Jack Byrnes. It's just an impression.

◊ Her claims regarding terrain and sinuses and temperature affecting the phonetics of dialects remind of the hokum I mentioned this past summer. But take a look at the IMDb page. At least one viewer thinks those are interesting claims. The stuff sells. Fallacies are the best opiate.

◊ Washington's label of Major and Minor keys in accents is particularly interesting. I can't imagine how the intonations of dialects would be bound to a major or minor key. They're really just full of accidentals. And given the relatively narrow range of pitches and the great variation in tones from phrase to phrase and sentence to sentence it's much more likely that we're looking at a chromatic scale.

This major/minor distinction is a tough one for the untrained. People really know as little about music as they do about linguistics. Earlier today a rerun of My Wife and Kids featured a guest appearance by the wonderful Betty White. In one scene she plays a difficult passage on the piano and remarks "Did you hear that? ... Your C-major is a quarter tone off." C major could be a quarter tone off. Sure. But that wouldn't be a helpful observation because it could really only mean that one note in the C major chord or scale is off. And that same note could be in the A minor scale (It would have to be really) or the C harmonic minor or the C minor or the A major...as long as it's a white key. But back to the dialect stuff:

Washington makes the distinction between major and minor keys by saying that in a major key the speaker sounds self assured and confident and in a minor key the phrases and sentences don't end on any clear and definite note. Notes are all just as definite in every key. She seems to be talking about phrase ending intonation which is sometimes a rising or falling tone and sometimes not. But that has nothing to do with keys. Each key is as definite as the rest.

The best example of the difference between a major and minor key that I can think of (and that people are likely to recognize) is the Gracie Films fanfare best known from the closing credits for The Simpsons. The normal ditty is in a major key but the Halloween Treehouse of Horror episodes feature a little shift into a minor key.

Well obviously he's comprehensible

This topic came up today in my practicum for teaching intro linguistics. Subtitles convey more than just a simple ongoing transcript of a spoken text. The decision for or against using subtitles carries with it the implication that some accents and pronunciation patterns are more or less likely to be understood by some viewers. But for which viewers are the subtitles intended?



I habitually set the television to display subtitles. No matter what's on. So I often wonder how newscasts documentaries and telezine programs (60 Minutes, 48 Hours, Dateline, Frontline...) rationalize their alternating subtitling choices. I've seen several episodes in which it's clear that the choice involves a lot more than pure phonetics and phonology.

Recognizing the implicit claims made regarding standard forms and mainstream usage helps to identify what lines the editors feel deserve attention. And which viewers are valued/catered to.

Stress management

In a recent post (Problems with lexical stress--27 July 2007) John Wells suggests that compound adjectives such as "long-term" and "sabre-toothed" are probably double stressed and should be marked in isolated occurrence with primary end-stress: ˌlong-ˈterm, ˌsabre-ˈtoothed.

These adjectives usually occur in a phrase before a noun (long-term plans; sabre-toothed tiger) and as Mr Wells hears them the stress in this environment would shift, creating a contour: long-term plans; a sabre-toothed tiger.

Because lexical stress is usually determined by the contour of the word in isolation Wells identifies a problem of contrastive implication. As he sees it, if the stress in predicative position remains initial "we would implicitly be contrasting sabre- with some other kind of toothedness."

Since stress is lexical it's also prone to dialectal variation. While reading his post I kept repeating "sabre-toothed" and realized that primary stress on the initial syllable sounded most natural in almost all contexts. The contrastive exception would be if someone misunderstood me and thought I had said "sabre-hoofed" the correction would be: "No. I said 'sabre-toothed'.

Buffy used the same initial stress when I asked her to answer using the isolated compound adjective. And the same result with "Was the tiger Siberian?" "No. It was sabre-toothed."

Of course there are some phrases that are frozen in their stress pattern. Wells identifies "pear-shaped" as one such fixed contour in which the primary stress is the only option. In his dialect 'sabre-toothed' is not such a phrase though it is in mine.

A while ago (19 June 2007) he wrote about the emerging spelling pronunciation of 'wort' in St John's Wort. He grew up hearing it pronounced [sənt ˈdʒɒnz wɜːt] with the same vowel as word and worse. Now he hears many people pronouncing the 'wort' as 'wart' a spelling pronunciation influenced by the short snort report pattern.

This makes some sense considering that the traditional contour did not put stress on 'wort' but the emerging contour does. Wells notes that the traditional pronunciation "is still generally the botanists’ pronunciation." While the new pronunciation is common among "British aficionados of herbal remedies." American ones too.

I might could say something. But oughten should I?

Last weekend I found myself talking about linguistics more than usual. I was in a college town away from home making new acquaintances and explaining to most them what I'm studying. One nice fellow made the common joke "Oh well then I'll be careful with what I say." I laughed and assured him that he misunderstood what most linguists do. I told him that I'm not a grammarian. I'm not a high school English teacher. I'm not a copy editor. I'm not a pedant. Well I try not to be a pedant.

"In fact" I said to him "I'm probably your biggest advocate. I cherish the view that language is what people do with words. Not what they think they're supposed to do with words." He gave a nod (halfway between "cool!" and "really?") then the discussion turned to mountain biking.

Another conversation with someone later in the weekend stayed on track a little longer. This fellow grew up in Massachusetts then moved to Tennessee. No marker of either region in his speech. I was very disappointed with him and I let him know. "You could have one fascinating blend of accents" I told him. "But you sound like a broadcast posterboy." He laughed and told me that his mother was from Colombia which I jokingly told him made his story all the more tragic.

Our discussion of Southern speech brought up the writings of Richard Mitchell. He spoke in agreement with Mitchell's claim that unless you can organize your words you can't organize your thoughts. I wasn't comfortable in going along with this claim but neither did I want to attack a new friend's sensibilities. So I asked if this was a strict or relative Sapir-Worfian view he was promoting. We agreed on relative before continuing.

But I held my tongue when he made one statement that I would have had to tear apart if I addressed it. The claim that education in the south is atrocious because of phrases like "mighta could" corrupting the minds of the students. "How can they teach anything if they can't apply any rules to their language?"

I understand that this phrase conforms to a standard that many people do not respect. I think the standard should be respected but I understand the role of register and decorum. Know your audience and do what you can to preserve your credibility with them. If you lose their respect it helps to understand what might have contributed to that.

But I must say this again and again. Language that ignores your rules is not ignoring all regulation. It simply heeds other regulations. All language has rules. Some people think certain dialects are rebel dialects due to the following types of reasoning:

They only ignore rules because they don't know them.
If they ignore certain rules they must hate authority. So they will ignore all rules.
Give them an inch and they'll take a mile.

These are basic complaints common to prescriptivists. When a linguist offers evidence of rules the argument relies on a history of laziness. 'Well they might have some rules now but the change came about because of laziness and ignorance.'

At some point in my conversations I have to sit back and wonder how much to "correct" these ideas. I have a bad habit of trying to show when I have information that counters any claim I hear. If the claim is a threat to equality or justice maybe I should be a little more brash about asserting it. But is it possible for me to be a vigilant defender of language variation without being a jerk too?

Where the women are strong

Mr Verb has posted on the representation of Minnesota Dialect in the Cohen brothers' film Fargo. He does a very nice job describing the features as heard in the film comparing them to the features as they occur in the actual dialect. Go read it.

It reminded me of my post from last September about Buffy's pre-velar raising. Dialectal phonological variation is one of my favorite linguistic areas. To learn a little more about the various AmE dialects take a look also at a couple of sites that I've added to my Resources link list.

Linguists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are doing a lot of research on the "Skonnie" dialect and they've put up a website providing a lot of information.

More generally--the Harvard Dialect Survey has produced some fascinating dot maps from its huge lot of data.

Now go watch Fargo. It's my favourite film by the Cohen brothers. It's disturbing. It's hilarious. It's ridiculous. It's heartwarming.

Or just go listen to some Garrison Keillor. He paints a picture of Minnesota true to all of those qualities without subjecting us to a wood-chipper scene.

[Update:
I see that the Harvard survey site isn't loading up. The link is correct and it was working fine just a couple of days ago. We'll wait a while and see what's up.
]

But officer I wasn't not going that fast

I was looking for good scenery but traffic and the Iowan landscape made pictures difficult. When Buffy started impatiently tailgating an enormous truck I shook loose from my fear and noticed some writing. She got more than close enough for me to make out the message so I got the camera out and snapped this picture.

It's a little hazy. I didn't have time to get a really good shot. By the time I was able to get the focus and framing right Buffy was flooring it and passing semi.

As I understand the message it means that driving 55 mph is too slow to ensure that the produce will be fresh when it finally arrives. So the driver has to go faster than 55.

It's more evidence of negative concord in PdE. That slash-circle is the visual equivalent of a negative morpheme. In some English dialects it would have to be silent in order to avoid further semantic content: It isn't fresh at 55. But in other dialects we can imagine the negative working for emphasis.

FOREMAN: Them potatoes better be fresh. And you better not get no speeding ticket on the way here!
DRIVER: It ain't gonna be fresh at no 55 miles an hour!

I've seen instances of this visual negative concord before. Remember the Red Rocker? His shirts are still out there on eBay.

How is that now?

My brother-in-law Mark recently sent out a response to one of those questionnaire emails that that gets sent around as a forward. This one was simple and contained very pedestrian questions about everyday things: what's your favourite color, favourite restaurant, favorite flavour of ice-cream, where would you like to retire...

For a cuisine he doesn't care for he wrote down a type of rice that he called "pagaw." I had no idea what this was.

Now my family, influenced by my mother's taste for Puerto Rican cuisine, has always loved the rice that sticks to the bottom of the pan and toasts to a lovely crunchy crunchiness. I once attended an Hispanic potluck where a Hispanic but non-Puerto Rican woman serving the rice reached to the bottom of the pan with her spoon and grumbled something about the rice being almost burnt. As she picked up the dish and was about to take it into the kitchen to throw it out every Puerto Rican within earshot of her annoyed complaint charged the table and demanded that she scrape out the rice and serve it. It's the best part! they yelled (in Spanish) even louder than usual.

In Puerto Rican Spanish the dental approximant [ð̞] in -ado, the past-participle ending of a word, is often elided resulting in an ending [-ao] sounding very close to the diphthong in English "how" "now" "brown" and "cow". Slightly less rounding of the falling segment.

I remember my grandfather offering toast to everyone in the house calling out ¿quién quiere pan tostao? instead of "tostado." When going to the beach I'd have to have cuidao or I'd end up quemao.

So as the Spanish word for "stuck" is "pegado" Puerto Ricans will often pronounce it [pɛgao].

When I first read Mark's "pagaw" I had in mind a pronunciation more like [paga] or [pɔgɔ]. Something that would rhyme with the second syllable of "heehaw". The spelling did not at all look like [pɛgao] to me. Apparently he hears the lax [ɛ] in Spanish (or at least our relaxed pronunciation of it) as a schwa. And in an unstressed syllable an 'a' makes sense in English for the schwa even though I would have expected an "e". And I must assume that he hears the diphthong as [aʊ] or [aw] which is probably how we gringified speakers say it--which I would have expected him to represent with the spelling "-ow". But that can be confused with the [oʊ]/[ow] sound in know low throw and blow.

And confusing things a more was that since this was probably a foreign word (some rice he had recently eaten at an exotic restaurant I assumed) I figured the "a" was probably not a schwa. In fact I thought the word might have the equal stress of a spondee. This assumption might have been further contaminated by the spondaic city name nearby: Paw Paw. A name which I always pronounce with an even stress and the single vowel [ɔ] as in "saw" "law" or...well..."paw" -- but which my mother (who speaks with a notable accent) always pronounces with the diphthong [aʊ] -- much closer to the "how" "now" contour.

But Mark doesn't speak Spanish and since he doesn't have a southern accent I can't think of any word spelled with [-aw] that he would pronounce as [aw] or [aʊ]. Is this a case of vigilantly foreignized orthographical transcription?

Speaking Trippingly

Buffy has a funny habit of pronouncing words both carefully and "efficiently" at the same time (I'll give examples in my next post). I say efficiently because I'm trying to remain neutral on dialectal judgment. One of my professors likes to use the phrase "lazy pronunciation" to describe phonological alternations, but I don't like the implications of "lazy."

Steven Pinker makes an excellent case against the view that speech markers are the result of lazy articulation. In The Language Instinct he first points out that the same people "who are derided for dropping g's in Nothin' Doin' are likely to enunciate the vowels in pó-lice and acci-dént that pointy-headed intellectuals reduce to a neutral "uh" sound" (180).

Add to that the diphthongization of the vowels in "tin can" -- leading the words to become disyllabic instead of monosyllabic -- and how can we call it lazy when some words are pronounced with units that are more marked and others with a greater number of units. Northern [kæn] is more simple than [kæ:jǝn]. So the Southern American accent is doing more work -- quantitatively.

Pinker also makes the argument that assimilative articulation is completely natural. He draws on the analogy that when you reach for a saucer and a coffee cup you grab the edge closest to you and you put your hand in the grasping position before you touch the cup.

Let's look at another example. I'll make the analogy from walking through a door to the post-stress intervocalic voicing in American English [t] > [d,ɾ]. Imagine walking towards a glass door that you know opens by pushing. Imagine further that you are familiar with this door and know that it opens easily without a strong push. When you approach the door you see there is no one on the other side and you put your hand forwards to contact the door and push it aside while your stride continues. In my observation I have seen that even when the door opens towards the "walker" and even when a knob has to turn to unlatch the door there is still often one foot in motion so that the stride of the walker is barely interrupted -- at most it slows just a bit.

Is this continuous movement of the feet evidence of slovenly or slurred motion? Would we say that these people are slaughtering the beauty of graceful and careful walking? On the contrary. By anticipation and adaptation this shows balance and agility. How odd it would look if before every door the walker stopped -- put out a hand -- placed palm against handle -- closed fingers around handle -- pulled door -- stepped through door...etc.

And yet we argue this as the very virtue of a good speaker. When I say "water" with a strict [t] between the vowels I find myself feeling stilted and guilty. That interruption of voice is just as unnecessary as the flat-footed stop in front of a door. In my dialect there is a wonderful allophone corresponding the voiceless and voiced alveolar stop: the alveolar 'tap' or 'flap.' This is not a simple and easy phone. It's a very quick and light lingual articulation. It requires great precision to avoid sounding like the lateral [l] or the voiced fricative usually represented orthographically as 'z' or 'zh'. To argue that this allophone is a product of laziness is like arguing that a running-back is lazy because he runs around a linebacker instead of walking right up to him and trying to push him over.