W's "A"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Sep 16, 2005, at 10:43 AM, Alison Murie wrote:

> W's dialect is a bit of a mystery, at least to me.  It always
> sounds as if
> he's making it up as he goes along.  It's something most of us do
> from time
> to time, but usually with the intention of sounding playful or
> ironic, not
> if we're trying to be seriously persuasive.

> I'm surprised W's handlers haven't schooled him out of some of the
> mistakes
> he makes.  A case in point:  his last night's speech, from which
> I've heard
> several clips of his saying,  "We have A [ei] duty...." which has a
> distinctly hollow ring, when if he said, "We have a [uh or @]
> duty," it
> would sound as if he were really talking instead of reading a script.

see Mark Liberman's postings on Language Log about "unreduction" of
the english articles.  most recently, "Emphatic unreduction again":

   http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002376.html

there are pointers back to a series of earlier postings, including
this one ("Of thee (and ay) I sing") that looks at W's speech in
particular:

   http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002346.html

W does have quite a lot of unreduced "a" (and somewhat less unreduced
"the"), but then, it turns out, so do a lot of other people.  (and
another lot of people have almost no unreduced "a" and "the".)  now
that mark, and chris waigl, have gotten me listening for this stuff,
i'm tortured by the frequency of the phenomenon.  (if i had a *lot*
of time on my hands, i'd listen systematically to bob dylan's
recorded music, which deploys unreduced "a", and occasionally "the",
for some effect i don't yet understand -- and in different places in
different performances of the same song.)

as for W, surely part of the reason so many people notice his
unreduced articles is that they're listening for infelicities in his
speech.  start listening all the time, and you'll hear other people
do it too.

by the way, the terminology "unreduced" is not intended to presuppose
that the unreduced pronunciations are somehow the more basic,
natural, or standard -- an idea that mark explicitly mocks in a very
funny posting, "They have ears, but they hear not":

   http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002312.html

the normal, standard pronunciations have reduced vowels, so
"unreduced" is not a bad name for the prounciations with full vowels
(pronunciations that are surely based on spelling, from a historical
point of view, at least).

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)