the thin line between error and mere variation II

[Dennis R. Preston]

as arnold well knows, this mismatch has been looked at formally in
so-called "linguistic insecurity" studies, early on in Labov's NYC
study and then in Trudgill's Norwich study, the latter of which
coined the terms "over-" and "underreporters" for those who said they
used more (or less) of the standard form than they actually did. This
led to the codification of the notions of "overt" and "covert"
prestige and to their early applications to sex-related preferences
in language. Although a lot of water has flowed over (and under) the
sociolinguistic dam since, these early efforts are worth remembering.

On a more anecdotal note, I actually once heard an otherwise
respectable linguist say that of course untrained speakers might err
in self-report but that once one had linguistic awareness (i.e.,
formal training) no such mismatch was possible. As the great
political thinker Rush Limbaugh might say, "Hoo boy!"

dInIs

>On Jun 29, 2004, at 7:55 PM, Wilson Gray notes the following phenomenon:
>
>>There are people who, in their unmonitored speech, always mispronounce
>>a
>>given (class of) word. However, when this mispronunciation is called to
>>their attention, they deny that said mispronunciation is part of their
>>idiolect and "demonstrate" this by giving the word in question its
>>standard pronunciation. Then they go right back to their idiosyncratic
>>pronunciation. E.g.
>>
>>A. I'm goin' up the skreek. You want anything?
>>B. Do you know that you always say "skreek" instead of "street"?
>>A. (Annoyed) What the hell are you talkin' about? I don't say "skreek"!
>>I say "street"!
>>B. Oh. Okay. My bad.
>>A. Like I said, I'm goin' up the skreek. You want anything?
>
>the generalization is that, in a great many settings, people tend to
>believe that they say what they think they're supposed to say.  it's a
>species of earnest self-delusion.
>
>so wilson's example is a lot like people's insisting that they never
>"drop their g's" -- and then, of course, do so as soon as their
>attention is focused elsewhere.
>
>some years back we had a discussion here about r-omission by otherwise
>rful speakers, and i noted that lots of people, a fair amount of the
>time, didn't have an r in the first syllable of "quarter".  as the
>discussion went on, people who protested that they'd never heard of
>such a thing, etc. suddenly caught *themselves* saying "quater"
>(exactly the response i had when my first linguistics teacher, the
>classicist samuel atkins of princeton, pointed out that this was my
>usual pronunciation).
>
>more recently I've had a certain number of excellent writers (like
>louis menand) and linguists (like larry trask) and authorities on
>writing claim to me that they never used possessive antecedents for
>pronouns, though in fact they did, they did.
>
>one of those things that can make self-reports, including acceptability
>judgments, perilous.
>
>arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)