free variation in pronunciation

[Dennis R. Preston]

Lynne hits the nail on the head here. I take the two forms - two
meanings (in the broad sense) to be a pretty good general account, so
much so that I would want to examine claims to the contrary (and free
variation is always such a claim) very carefully. One thing that does
not qualify (in my opinion) as careful consideration of such claims
is self-report. If the Observer's Paradox ever raised its ugly head,
it is surely when the observer is self.

Of course, I take all this self-report to be enormously good material
for folk linguistics.

dInIs (another of whose laws is "Never say what anybody else said;
while you're at it, never say what you said." - where 'say what was
said' means "Give an accurate account of the linguistic detail of
what was uttered." Again, I done forgot which number this law is.)

>dInIs said:>
>>
>>  Nothing can be said to be in free variation until extensive research
>>  on the probabilistic influences of phonological, morphological,
>>  syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic (including interactional,
>>  attitudinal, etc...) environments on the item in question has been
>>  carried out.
>
>I take your point seriously.  I'm working from my own experience of
>having made
>various hypotheses about my own use of the two pronunciations and having them
>all disproved when someone's pointed out to me that I've used one where I've
>said I use the other.  I'd love to see an in-depth study of this done, but I'd
>want to see it done on the individual rather than language-community level
>(i.e., consider several people, but consider their data separately), and the
>fact that it's a pronunciation variation makes corpus studies hard to do for
>it.
>
>What I'm trying to react to is the claim that the two pronunciations of
>neither/either (in free variation) flout the different forms-->different
>meanings convention in language.  Obviously, for some people on the list
>the two forms do have different social meanings, because one is more 'foreign'
>and seemingly 'snootier'.  In my northeastern experience, there's more
>opportunity for free variation, since one of the forms is not so 'otherly'.
>I'm wondering whether such free variation is more tolerated in closed class
>word categories, since the closed classes will not as easily allow for
>semantic change (they allow for change, but not as readily as in the open
>classes).  The other much discussed example of possible true synonymy in
>English is another closed-class set, the pronouns ending in -one and -body.
>As we've already discussed here, these two seem to be not so synonymous as
>Jespersen inter alia claimed.  At the moment, the two pronunciations of
>'either' and 'neither' are the closest things I have to examples of true
>synonymy.
>
>A lot of the things that people have offered to me as examples of free
>variation do not meet the definition that I'm using--that they must be
>freely variant in a single individual's idiolect.  If you say 'tomayto' and
>I say 'tomahto', then the two forms are in complementary distribution across
>idiolects (and probably dialects).  I, as a matter of fact, say 'tomayto'
>and 'tomahto', but this still doesn't count because I say the first when
>speaking to North Americans and the second when speaking to others--so it's
>in socially/geographically complementary distribution.
>
>So, while I agree with dInIs that it's too easy to claim that either/neither
>are in free variation, even within my own idiolect, I am without the
>wherewithall to disprove the claim that they are, and so (in order to
>complete an argument regarding the nature of synonymy), am looking for
>possible explanations and fellow examples in order to see whether the counter-
>example that they present is a threat to the theory or not.
>
>Does anyone have a student who wants a thesis topic?
>
>Lynne

--
Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736