Austen and language change

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:14 AM -0400 9/2/08, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
>Interesting, and certainly the "my father" reference would be marked today. I
>assume that the two sisters were not having a tiff?

Not at all; in fact it's used both by the
sympathetic protagonist Anne to her unsympathetic
sister Elizabeth in one scene and by the equally
unsympathetic sister Mary to Anne in another.  No
discourse markedness in either case.  For us, it
seems very general, applying to "my dog", "my
house", "my upcoming trip", etc.--all of these
equally implicate 'not yours'.  Since that
implicature is not present for Austen with "my
father", I'm wondering why not (and for which
possessives, inalienable or not).

>If so, a 20th century
>participant could take it as perhaps meaning 'Father as he appears to me as
>opposed to your view of him'.

True, and we could actually use "my X" without
any 'not yours' implicature in such a context, at
least marginally*, but I'm pretty sure that's not
involved in any of Austen's uses.

LH

*Such as:
Younger sister complaining to older sister, "No,
I'm not going to the party, because my *parents*
(my *mother*, my *father*) say(s) I'm too young.

>Ausgten can be very subtle ...
>
>In a message dated 9/2/08 10:07:19 AM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:
>
>
>>  So I'm listening to _Persuasion_ (1818) as a
>>  talking book and realizing that for me this is a
>>  better way to notice unusual usage than in actual
>>  reading.  Some lexical items that are older than
>>  I thought--I was struck, for example, by a
>>  reference to an "unmodernized" house.  Sounded a
>>  bit...modern to me, and it sort of is; turns out
>>  the OED has one cite for "unmodernized" before
>>  1883, and it's this very one from _Persuasion_.
>>  Then there's the occasional syntactic archaism,
>>  of course; one that struck my ear was the tag in
>>  "they called here afterward, did not they?" where
>>  we'd have either "did they not?" or "didn't
>>  they".  But the one that really seemed odd is a
>>  pragmatic shift that we may or may not have
>>  discussed here: when any one of the three Eliot
>>  sisters is speaking to one or both of the other
>>  two, she refers to their progenitor as "my
>>  father", with no implication that the referent
>>  isn't also "your father".  I'm pretty sure this
>>  usage must have disappeared by the Victorian age
>>  in favor of "Father" or "our father", or in
>>  informal usage "Pa", "Papa", "Dad", "our dad",
>>  etc., but I don't know when.  (I assume the same
>>  was true for "my mother", "my sister", etc.).
>>  Just out of curiosity, does anyone know the point
>>  when it became impossible, or highly marked, to
>>  use "my father" in addressing one's sibling, and
>>  whether anyone has discussed this shift from a
>>  sociolinguistic (or other) perspective?  Did
>>  something similar take place with "mon père",
>>  "meine Mutter", etc.?
>>
>>  LH
>>
>>  ------------------------------------------------------------
>>  The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>
>
>
>
>**************
>It's only a deal if it's where you want to go. Find your travel
>deal here.
>
>(http://information.travel.aol.com/deals?ncid=aoltrv00050000000047)
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org