prescriptivism, conventions, irony, and could(n't) care less

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Wednesday, January 31, 2001 9:28 am +0800 Laurence Horn
<laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:

> While the adverbial use of "good" and other
> adverbs-in-adjectival-clothing ("You played real good") relates to
> the prescriptivism thread, I think there's something else going on in
> the mainstreaming of "You done good", which is covert prestige
> dialect borrowing, where a particular construction from what is
> perceived as a lower-class dialect than the one the speaker normally
> employs is imported wholesale for various sociolinguistic reasons.

Yes, I agree, and this has to do with the 'humor' and 'self-deprecation'
that I referred to.  I'm not sure if English listeners don't 'get it' (a)
because such covert prestige borrowing is something an Englishperson
wouldn't think to do, or (b) because they don't have enough sense of US
dialects to recognize the interdialectal borrowing when they hear it.
Either (or both) is (or are!) likely, so far as I can tell.

Lynne

M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320