Is there such a phenomenon as "undercorrection/hypocorrection?

[Matthew Gordon]

So by Wilson's analysis what the man said was
"He aks me 'who's, uh, who car was it?"
Right? In other words he was uncontracting a contraction in this formal
context.


On 3/16/05 4:58 PM, "Wilson Gray" <wilson.gray at RCN.COM> wrote:

> Yes, they both were. It was the "Judge Joe Brown" show, which is a
> clone of "Judge Judy," if you're not familiar with it. Anyway, Judge
> Joe has absolutely no sympathy for the common street thug and has
> made that very clear. My impression was that the speaker, a common
> street thug, suddenly became aware of the difference between his
> low-class BE and the judge's middle-class BE. And, knowing that Judge
> Joe Brown is not the kind of brother that you can conversate with, he
> decided that it would behoove him to talk as "proper" as he could.
> But you really have to have had practice in order to switch to
> another dialect in mid-utterance, unless you're doing it all the
> time. I think our guy meant to shift "aks" to "ast" or even "asted,"
> but it was already too late and he wound up "down-shifting," so to
> speak, from the "proper" "whose" to "who" by accident.
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Beverly Flanigan <flanigan at OHIOU.EDU>
>> Subject:      Re: Is there such a phenomenon as
>>               "undercorrection/hypocorrection?
>> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> --
>>
>> Were both the interviewer and the guest black?  Might this have been
>> accommodation to an "in-group" interlocutor?
>>
>> At 04:14 PM 3/16/2005, you wrote:
>>> Spoken by a black TV-show guest:
>>>
>>> He aks me _whose, uh, who_ car was this.
>>>
>>> -Wilson