Is there such a phenomenon as "undercorrection/hypocorrection?

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Thu Mar 17 00:22:14 UTC 2005


At 4:36 PM -0500 3/16/05, Dennis R. Preston wrote:
>2) structural - when you try to use a "lower status" (presumably
>covertly prestigious form) but get it wrong. Spose one of you
>flatlanders wanted to sound like a hillbilly and got into
>a-prefixing. You might utter "I  was a-rememberin what Ole Joe tole
>me." But you would be wrong; a-pefixing doesn't occur before
>unstressed syllables.

But fortunately, we'd remember our Wolfram & Schilling-Estes just in
time and pre-correct our imminent hypocorrection.  Actually, in this
case, couldn't we flatlanders do a little 'pocope prep first and come
out with "I was a-'memberin..."?

Larry



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