the psychology of Gray/Grey

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:58 PM +0100 10/16/00, Lynne Murphy wrote:
>Ron Butters says:
>
>>But GREY and GRAY? I guess this must be some kind of back formation on the
>>analogy of such homophones as TAIL and TALE (or PAIR, PEAR, and PARE), but
>>the inference that the difference between a spelled E and a spelled A would
>>signal a difference in SHADE of grey/gray strikes me as counterintuitive.
>>Would one infer that COLOR&COLOUR have slightly different meanings, or
>>THEATRE&THEATER?? Are there any other alternate spellings in which the
>>semantic difference is one of degree rather than kind? Some spellings MAY BE
>>fancy and some plain, but connotatively, not denotatively.
>
>I'm with you on this.  I think people are associating the spellings
>differently because of having seen them in different contexts--e.g.,
>catalog(ue)s (heather grey, etc.) and paint tubes (Gray 7), but doubt
>they truly have different denotations.  If it seems like they have
>different denotations, then it's because different kinds of gr{e/a}y
>are found in different contexts.  Of course, to (dis)prove (or at
>least support) the claims of contrastive use, we'd need a corpus of
>the past writing of the people who claim to use them contrastively
>with sufficient occurrences of the words to come to a conclusion.
>
>With theatre/theater, I'll bet that people will associate the former
>with an art form and the latter with lecture or operating theaters.
>But this, again, I think is an issue of style (use the more European
>spelling for the more 'cultural' thing) rather than two lexical items
>existing.  (To beat one of my favo(u)rite drums, it's a matter of
>metalinguistic rather than linguistic knowledge.)
>
>Orthographically yours,
>Lyn(n(e))
>--
Well, there is the general tendency, cited by Bréal, Bolinger and
others, to avoid full synonymy or overlap.  So if someone has seen
"grey" and "gray" (and isn't aware of some general non-functional
principle of differentiation operating here the way it does with the
U.S. -or/Brit. -our spellings), one will naturally assume there's
SOME difference, and then creativity and imagination take over.  I
agree about theater/theatre, and there are additional variables--I
can imagine a movie theater or theatre under either spelling, but
burlesque must be "theatre".  A nice additional example of the
"greasy"/"greazy" distinction (on which see Bagby Atwood's old paper)
is "vase".  Every year I teach Dialects, at least one student and
usually more swears that a cheap one is a [veys] but an expensive one
is a [va:z].  (I broke your veys, but you broke my va:z.)  I tend to
agree--a "beautiful Ming veyx" really seems wrong.  But of course
it's not so much different lexical items as different pronunciations
in different registers.  I can also imagine, although this is
speculative, a child growing up with a young, maybe neo-hippie [aent]
Jennifer and a distinguished elderly [a:nt] (or perhaps great-[a:nt]
Gwendolyn.

larry