W's "A"

[Peter A. McGraw]

W shares a lot of linguistic mannerisms with his daddy, whose public
speaking, at least, was larded with lots of emphatic forms, often in (to
me, at least) unexpected contexts.

Peter Mc.

--On Friday, September 16, 2005 11:28 AM -0700 "Arnold M. Zwicky"
<zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:

> 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)



***************************************************************************
Peter A. McGraw       Linfield College        McMinnville, Oregon
******************* pmcgraw at linfield.edu ****************************