~ (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Randy Alexander]

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 9:20 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>>I'm not sure that a statement like that is so incredible.  If one took
>>the stance that there is no such thing as a "standard" American
>>English, then wouldn't that preclude the existence of any
>>"substandard" forms?
>
> In fact, that's not a term generally used by scientists in this field.

Sorry.  I should have said "non-standard", which is certainly common
enough.  For example, in Huddleston & Pullum's _A Student's
Introduction to English Grammar_ (p2): "Alongside Standard English
there are many robust local, regional, and social dialects of English
that are clearly and uncontroversially *non-standard*."  This
quotation is mainly talking about syntax, but doesn't exclude
pronunciation.

If there were no such thing as "standard", then the OED would not have
to mark some words as "dial.".  I don't think that one can so easily
say that there is no standard.  The difficulty lies in drawing
boundaries around that standard.

>>Don't most people believe there is a "standard" American English?  If
>>most people didn't believe that, then why would there be "accent
>>reduction" classes, etc?
>>
>>I think it's pretty well established that "standard" American English
>>(or General American, or Broadcast English, or whatever you want to
>>call it) is not very well defined, but that doesn't mean there isn't
>>such a thing.
>>
>>I've often wondered how to go about defining it.  One strategy that
>>has come to mind would be to carefully examine the speech of Peter
>>Jennings, Tom Brockaw, and Dan Rather, as they, having been heard by
>>most Americans daily for over 20 years, perhaps are the considered by
>>most Americans as representative of this "standard" American English.
>
> I'm sure others with more expertise will jump in, but it might be
> worth pointing out that Jennings (who was a Canadian), Brokaw (a
> Midwesterner), and Rather (a South Midland speaker) couldn't be joint
> representatives of a single variety, unless it's defined loosely
> enough to be useless.  If you're talking grammar, maybe (although
> even there it would have been pretty incongruous to imagine Jennings
> or Brokaw coming out with some of Rather's...um, downhomeisms)--but
> phonology?  Not particularly close.

Rather's downhomeisms could be excluded from this standard, as could
other aspects in one that are not represented in the other two.  I
doubt that two ideolects could be exactly the same anyway.  It may
well be that my idea of analyzing the "big three" is a bad one, but I
still have no reason to believe that there is no "standard".

You mentioned "loosely enough to be useless".  Why couldn't the
boundaries around this "standard" pronunciation be wide enough to
include a certain amount of variation?  For example, there could be a
considerable amount of variation in ash-tensing within the standard
(even in an individual speaker).

I've been a little curious in the time I've been on this list as to
why so much effort is being spent in separating dialects, but not in
looking at what unifies these dialects.  Through corpus studies we
have seen that there is a standard grammar defined by frequency of
use.  There hasn't been so much study yet though looking at
pronunciation this way.

All but one of us seem to agree that it is not standard to put /g/ on
the end of "sang" in any environment.  I'm sure we could go through
the entire phoneme set and come up with standards for all of them that
could be agreed upon.  And as I mentioned, doing so could be very
useful:

>>I think it would be of great importance to ESL students to have
>>a clear model.  Right now the only clear model for them is RP, which
>>by my estimation probably only has about 1 million speakers worldwide.

It's ridiculous that learners of ESL in most countries have IPA in
their textbooks and dictionaries that corresponds to (an outdated
version of) RP, and they have no idea what RP even sounds like.  Let
alone the fact that there are so few speakers.

Are US dialects really that different?  What's the same about them?

--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China
My Manchu studies blog:
http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu

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