W's "A"

[Chris Waigl]

Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:

>unreduction in reading out loud (including from a script) is probably
>still another phenomenon,
>
As it happens, I have a rather startling example of _reduced_ "the"
before vowels in reading out loud, from someone who grew up in the
Midwest, has lived in various places in the US and has now settled in
Australia. She told me she thinks she "always speaks like that", but
unfortunately I don't have a recording of her off-the-cuff speech.

>motivated by a drive for "clarity", rather
>than hesitation, emphasis, or particularization ("oh, you mean *the*
>George W. Bush, not the George W. Bush who's my barber").
>
Particularization (thanks, I was wondering how this is called) is what everyone brings up first, but it is actually much rarer than other types of article unreduction.

>i don't know about W's rate of unreduction in off-the-cuff speaking,
>but i doubt very much that it's close to zero.
>
It isn't. And for GWB, unreduced "a" frequency does not simply rise with
increasing solemnity. I checked his eulogy for Reagan specifically, and
while there are quite a few unreduced "a"s, they are if anything less
frequent than in his other speeches and don't occur in the most solemn
passages (but rather, when he tries for levity).

That's different from Barbara Jordan, for example, but I don't have any
off-the-cuff speech of hers.

There is also something I call, tentatively, topicalization (for lack of
a better word): not in the grammatical sense (if for you there _is_ a
grammatical sense, anyway), but more loosely for nominals that signal
what a particular passage is talking about, but don't necessarily
receive more emphasis than other words in the same passage.

An example: In Reagan's 1964 speech that later became known under the
title "A Time of Choosing", one of his very few unreduced articles (3
preconsonantal "the"s out of 225) occurs before the word "choice": "and
discuss my own ideas regarding the[i] choice that we face in the[@] next
few weeks". I don't think this happened by chance.

>but this is an
>empirical question, one i hope that mark l. and chris w. are looking
>into.
>
>
I think we are.

Chris Waigl

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