Hypercorrection?

[Wilson Gray]

Maybe "defendant" is going the way of "anti-," non-distinct from
"ante-" in my youth, except as a slang term: "Man, that's way anti!"
wherein "anti" = [aentai] "negative, bad, lame." This could have been
motivated by a desire by the semi-literate ;-) to distinguish one from
the other. But there's also "semi" itself, which is now
[sEmai]/[sImai]. On the other hand, there's that TV ad in which "hemi"
is still "correctly" pronounced as [hEmi], well, as [hImI], at least,
and not as [hEmai]/hImai].

-Wilson

On 5/20/05, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> At 1:43 PM -0400 5/20/05, Wilson Gray wrote:
> >"She called my emploYER [Employ^r]." I.e. Stress is on the final
> >syllable. This looks like an overcorrection based on the stress
> >pattern of "employee," which didn't occur in the course of the
> >exchange.
> >--
> >-Wilson Gray
>
> Well, at least that one is plausible as a way of stressing the
> paradigmatic contrast you note (even when the syntagmatic contrast is
> absent), as well as a case of paradigmatic influence, much as with
> the now standard pronunciation of "covert" to rhyme with "overt"
> (instead of being a voiceless-final twin of  "covered" the way it
> used to).  The one that really puzzles me is "defendANT", with stress
> (or at least secondary stress and non-reduction of the vowel) in the
> final syllable, as used in legal lingo.  Was this originally to set
> it off from "defendER"?  I can't figure it out.
>
> Larry
>


--
-Wilson Gray