Hypercorrection

[Damien Hall]

I had to share this wonderful example of hypercorrection from my niece, 2 at the
time, currently acquiring probably middle-class Standard Southern British
English in London.

At Christmas 2003 we were decorating the house, of course, and her rendition of
the word for what we were decorating it with was

[dEkuh?Ejshns]

(ie with the intervocalic /r/ replaced with a glottal stop).  I interpreted it
as a hypercorrection arising from her presumably passive knowledge that there
is in fact no /r/ where linking [r]'s are heard in SSBE and other similar
varieties.  I say 'presumably passive knowledge' because she had certainly
never been actually corrected for putting a linking [r] in elsewhere, if she
ever does it, which I don't know.

Sadly, by Christmas 2003, she had changed it to the standard version.

Damien Hall
university of Pennsylvania