Is there such a phenomenon as "undercorrection/hypocorrection?

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

right, "who is car was it" is ungrammatical but what I'm saying is that he started to say "who's", maybe he had in mind something like "He asked me who's in the car" or something - anyway, he changed the structure of the sentence halfway through. As I type this I realize it sounds far fetched, but I wanted to suggest that someone concerned about impressing a judge is more likely to make their speech more formal (i.e. by undoing a contraction, and notice that 'who's' for 'who + was' is even more informal/vernacular than 'who + is') than to make it more informal. This would seem all the more likely if, as suggested, the speaker is a vernacular-speaking young African American talking to an older African American in a position of authority. In this context I can't understand the social motivation to make his speech more vernacular which is what 'whose > who' seems to result from.

Anyway, maybe Wilson has intuitions on this: is possessive 'who' a possible AAVE form (e.g. He the man who car I borrowed)? I realize that's why this example was posted as an example of hypocorrection, but does the form exist? You don't get in AAVE, as far as I know, possessive 'he' instead of 'his'. You have 'they' alternating with 'their' (e.g. That's they problem), but that's probably a result of r-lessness originally.


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Wilson Gray
Sent: Wed 3/16/2005 8:26 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject:      Re: Is there such a phenomenon as "undercorrection/hypocorrection?
 
Not quite. "Who is car was it" is ungrammatical. He said, "He [a
policeman] ax me whose, uh, who car was it." What the speaker did was
to "correct" the standard possessive in /-s/ to the BE possessive
without /-s/.

-Wilson

>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       Matthew Gordon <gordonmj at MISSOURI.EDU>
>Subject:      Re: Is there such a phenomenon as
>               "undercorrection/hypocorrection?
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>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
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>>>  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