Not "feeling" like losing an accent (dialect?)

[Beverly Flanigan]

At 10:15 PM 10/30/2006, you wrote:

>>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>-----------------------
>>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
>>Subject:      Re: Not "feeling" like losing an accent (dialect?)
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>On Oct 30, 2006, at 3:39 PM, Tom Zurinskas wrote to Beverly Flanigan:
>>
>> > ... My conjecture is that native USA English speakers that drop
>> > the sound "awe" and replace it with "ah" are exposed enough to the
>> > sound
>> > "awe" through TV and radio that they can say it if they want to but
>> > they
>> > don't want to.  As Krashen says in his conjecture, it doesn't feel
>> > right to
>> > them.  This is opposed to your conjecture that they actually
>> > physically
>> > "cannot say it"....
>>
>>krashen's conjectures are largely a red herring here.  and nobody's
>>conjecturing that people *physically* cannot produce certain sounds.
>>what's going on is something subtler: a *mental* barrier to producing
>>distinctions *in connected speech*.
>
>What's the difference.  If they cannot make a sound it's the physical
>apparatus cannot be made to say the sound.  What Bev said is "if they can't
>say it, they can't say it!  How many times do WE have to say this?"  Perhaps
>you could point something out to her.
>
>>as far as i know, people who have leveled /a/ and /O/ in favor of /a/
>>can certainly learn to produce [O] -- indeed, a great many of them
>>have done so, in exclamations like "awww" or in imitations of the
>>pronunciations of single words in other dialects (like the new
>>yorker's "cawfee").  what is so difficult is integrating the
>>distinction into connected speech.
>
>I agree, Bev's statement aside.  Krashen would agree with you too.
>
>>the problem is that each of us has acquired an amazingly complex,
>>highly automatized, and intricately coordinated set of routines for
>>producing our dialect of our native language.  almost all of this is
>>not under conscious control, and it could not possibly be: even a
>>short utterance requires hundreds of gestures, in sequence or
>>overlapping with one another, performed on a time scale of
>>milliseconds to centiseconds.  (similar things are true of speech
>>perception.)
>
>If one is making "hundreds of gestures... in milliseconds" not under
>conscious control how does anyone know about them.  They're unconscious.
>This must be conjecture.
>
>>that's the psychological side of things.  you can see similar effects
>>in child language acquisition. parents will tell you their kid "can't
>>pronounce"  r -- but the kid can imitate a dog's snarl  just fine, or
>>might be able to produce r in a single over-learned "favorite" word.
>>a kid who regularly devoices word-final d to t is often entirely
>>capable of producing a word-final d -- but only when aiming for the
>>even more difficult word-final n.  the problem isn't physical
>>ability, but psychological control of a complex set of coordinated
>>abilities.
>
>>this is not arcane knowledge, but the stuff of introductory
>>linguistics courses.
>>
>>but there's also a social side to things.  in principle, we could, if
>>sufficiently moved, learn to shift to another dialect, including
>>learning phonemic distinctions we didn't used to have.  but there has
>>to be a strong motivation to do so -- a social motivation, usually
>>also under the level of consciousness.
>>
>>we're all confronted by vast amounts of variation in language every
>>day.  in the face of that, almost everybody is conservative most of
>>the time, sticking pretty much to the system they've learned; there's
>>just too much to choose from.  certainly, nobody can know which
>>variants someone like you thinks they "ought" to be using, and if you
>>try to tell them how to talk they are naturally going to be resistant
>>(just as you are when people try to tell you how to talk).  yes,
>>people are resistant to change their habits, especially when these
>>are shared with the people closest to them.
>>
>>arnold
>
>And the relevance of this to the man mispronouncing "Shaw" as "Shah" is
>what?  I would assume that man comes from an area of "awe" droppers and is
>one himself.  So when faced with saying "Shaw" says "Shah" out of habbit and
>inclination.  But Bev says "if they can't say it, they can't say it!  How
>many times do WE have to say this?"  I believe you have pointed out some
>things to her.
>
>
>Tom Z
>
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Thanks for the condescension, Tom.  None of what Arnold said is new to me,
nor does any of it contradict what I've written ad nauseum.  Those of us
who are linguists have known all this for many years.  You are not a
linguist, and we are obviously not communicating to you.

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