FN + LN

[Laurence Urdang]

I find it amusing to note that when a foreigner speaks in a modern television drama he is marked by invariably speaking perfectly grammatical English (insofar as the writer can manage that) and pronouncing everything with great care.  This pertains to aliens, as to Teal'C in Stargate, who is heard to mutter, "Indeed" in response to almost anything said to him.
  There is an entire dialect set aside for American Indians, aliens, and others that might be worthy of some idiot's Ph.D. dissertation.
  Larry

"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: Re: FN + LN
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On Jun 6, 2007, at 9:02 AM, Jon Lighter wrote:

> Back in the '50s there was a Bugs Bunny cartoon involving Arab anti-
> rabbit terrorists from the _1001 Nights_. Hassan carried a scimitar
> that he would swing at Bugs while crying, "Hassan CHOP!"

i suspect that this is an instance of a different phenomenon, the use
of FN for self-reference attributed to "primitives" ("Tarzan love
Jane", as spoken by Tarzan), barely english-speaking foreigners (if i
recall correctly, Manuel in "Fawlty Towers" does this), and
toddlers. in all of these cases, the assumption is that the speakers
haven't mastered the pronoun system of english -- those troublesome
shifters -- and use the easier, fixed FN instead. so: not really
dissociative. rather, FN as a pronoun substitute.

toddlers, of course, actually do this. probably close to
universally, at least for some period of time.

an entertaining thread-tie to the influence-of-the-media-on-language
thread that's been going on: my daughter reports that on a number of
parenting forums, posters are really down on the Elmo character from
Sesame Street. they observe that Elmo uses "Elmo" for self-reference
and that their kids use *their* first names for self-reference, and
conclude that the first is the cause of the second -- that the kids
are imitating Elmo. so it's all Elmo's fault. bad bad Elmo.

it does no good, my daughter notes, to point out that kids who don't
watch Sesame Street use "pronominal" FN, that kids, almost all kids,
did this before Sesame Street came into being, and that kids all over
the world do it. or to point out that Elmo talks that way *because
he's talking like a toddler*; he's meeting the kids on their own
ground. no, no, the parents object: Elmo is serving as a bad
example; unless kids are exposed to nothing but "correct" language,
they'll never learn to talk right, or at least will be considerably
delayed in acquisition.

there's no reason to think this is so. what's crucial here, though,
is that the parents have the direction of influence backwards.

i think that much the same is true of speech in the media, in
relation to the spread of sound changes. there's always a pool of
variation in the population; certain variants become associated with
social groups and identities and then spread. innovative variants
then are used as part of the characterization of certain groups (like
Valley Girls) in the media. they are often exaggerated, but they're
based on real life. speech in the media isn't the cause of sound
changes, but a reflection of them.

arnold

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