Is there such a phenomenon as "undercorrection/hypocorrection?

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

OK, but if the man was motivated, as Wilson suggested, by trying to standard up his speech for the judge, why go vernacular? What I was suggesting was that he was reinterpreting "whose" as a contraction (who's) and uncontracting in deference to the formality of the situation or to his addressee. As we all know, contractions are a sign of laziness so he'd want to avoid them here.

BTW, is possessive 'who' actually attested for AAVE? I know that the possessive marker on nouns is variably dropped - though not as frequently as the 3rd sg. verbal marker is - but I don't recall having heard or read (in the literature) examples of it dropping from 'whose'. 



-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Dennis R. Preston
Sent: Wed 3/16/2005 7:07 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject:      Re: Is there such a phenomenon as "undercorrection/hypocorrection?
 
Nope; his analysis is (if I may speak for him) it that the possessive
;'whose" is replaced by the form 'who,' perfectly expressive of the
possessive (as we find in numerous varieties of AAVE, clearer perhaps
in such forms as "I saw Mary car," i.e. "Mary's").

dInIs

>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


--
Dennis R. Preston
University Distinguished Professor of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages
A-740 Wells Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824
Phone: (517) 432-3099
Fax: (517) 432-2736
preston at msu.edu