"di?nt" (with glottal stop)

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 23:39:19 -0500, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
wrote:

>It's been suggested (by Bolinger, and more recently me in a Linguist
>List thread a few years ago) that it's not an accident that medial
>glottal stops occur in both "uh-oh" and "unh-unh", where the latter
>rendering is intended to represent the open-mouth version of the
>disagreement marker (the counterpart of the agreement/assent marker
>"uh-huh", which crucially has no medial [?]).  The closed-mouth
>version of the disagreement/denial/rejection marker, which I won't
>even try to represent, also contains a medial glottal stop, and (like
>uh-oh and unh-unh) high tone-low tone.  The generalization seems to
>be that medial intervocalic [?] (not, of course, the [?] showing up
>before initial vowels) is associated with negation, especially in
>conjunction with the high/low tone sequence.  (Note that the open-
>and closed-mouth affirmative/assent markers, uh-huh and m-hm, both
>have low-high tone sequences as well as medial voiceless vowel (i.e.
>[h]) or voiceless nasal in place of [?].)  (Arguably, although this
>is even more speculative, it could be claimed that both the [?] and
>the high-low sequence are partially iconic representations of the
>semantic effect of negation.)   Now "didn't" is pretty negative too,
>which may (I did say this was speculative) have motivated speakers to
>assimilate it to the pattern of those voiceless "kitten" words that
>have the medial [?], even though the voiced [d] means it "should"
>(ceteris paribus) pattern with words like "hidden" and "wooden",
>which as Arnold and I have noted don't transform to -[?In] in the
>same way.
>
>Any buyers?

Sure, I'll buy it, especially since the stereotypical purveyor of "oh no
you/he/she [dI?In]" might very well accompany the catchphrase with other
medial-glottal forms like "uh-uh", "nuh-uh", and "mm-mm" to underscore the
speaker's astonishment/outrage towards a provocative statement.

--Ben Zimmer