Is there such a phenomenon as "undercorrection/hypocorrection?

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

I was kidding about the laziness.
I'm not calling the possessive a contraction; I'm talking about "who's' from 'who + was' as the contraction. Since this was a spoken example, we don't know whether the guy who said /huz/ meant 'whose' or 'who's'. The situation seemed to me to make uncontracting more likely as an explanation for /huz/ > 'who' than did the hypocorrection. Syntactically we have to say that he changed the structure of the sentence halfway, but...


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Mark A. Mandel
Sent: Thu 3/17/2005 10:22 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject:      Re: Is there such a phenomenon as "undercorrection/hypocorrection?
 
And Matthew Gordon writes:
   >>>>>
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.
 <<<<<

Irrelevant to your argument, a point on terminology: That's not a
contraction. The first word of "Mommy's home!" is a contraction for "Mommy
is", but the homographous first word of "Mommy's car" is the possessive form
of "Mommy", and not a contraction of anything. Ditto for "who's there?" and
"whose/who's car?".

-- Mark
[This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]