W's "A"

[Chris Waigl]

Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:

>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".)
>
For me, this summarizes it exactly.

I've listened to a lot of GWB since Mark Liberman, well, recruited me to
look into this, and to many other speakers as well. He is certainly one
of those who use unreduced "a" consistently, even though I'm not quite
clear about all the effects he achieves. It's not simply emphasis.

The highest proportion of unreduced "a"s I've found to date is in
Barbara Jordan's speeches: about 2/3 unreduced! And she clearly uses
unreduction of "a" (but not of "the"; at all) for rhetorical effect. An
example from her 1976 DNC keynote address:
<http://www.lascribe.net/thethethe/bj1976_people.mp3>  (34 sec excerpt)
-- listen to how she uses first reduced then unreduced "a" in the
repeated "a people" in the buildup/climax

    * We are a[@] people in a[ei] quandary about the[@] present.
    * We are a[@] people in search of our future.
    * We are a[ei] people in search of a[ei] national community.
    * We are a[@] people
    * trying not only to solve the[@] problems of the[@] present,
    * unemployment, inflation,
    * but we are attempting on a[ei] larger scale
    * to fulfill the[@] promise of America.

(I'm preparing a series of blog posts about the various effects or
circumstances where article unreduction occurs. If this list is
interested, I can post the links as I finish the posts.)

There is a lot of variation between speakers, and also regionally.

Unreduced "a" seems a bit more common in US English, while I find lots
and lots of unreduced "the" in some British speakers. Some hardly ever
do it (before consonants, of course). The BBC host Brian Hayes, who is
born in Australia, uses unreduced "the" extremely frequently; in some
recordings, nearly for all of his "the"s.

And I'm finding new phenomena all the time. Ben Zimmer -- I hope he
doesn't mind -- does something with his "the"s (in his interview about
the usage of "refugee") I hadn't heard before. But at least he does it
in places I'd have tagged as likely to have article unreduction (in this
case, before proper names).

Chris Waigl

--
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