~ (UNCLASSIFIED)

[David Bowie]

From:    Randy Alexander <strangeguitars at GMAIL.COM>
> On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 9:20 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>> Randy Alexander(?) 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.

You're making a logical error here. There are certainly nonstandard
(though i prefer nonstandardized) varieties of English. This does not,
however, mean that there is a single standard (i prefer standardized)
variety of English. In fact, it doesn't mean that there is a standard
variety of English that actually exists in real life.

The way i see it, each speaker has some mental representation of what
standard English is. (Perhaps it's a finer distinction: standard
American English, or standard job-interview American English, of
standard hanging out with friends American English, or whatever.) This
does *not* mean, however, that that speaker actually uses any of those
standardized varieties, nor does it mean that anybody else does--nor, in
fact, does it mean that that speaker's mental conceptions of what the
standardized varieties are like actually matches up perfectly with
anybody else's mental representations of standard Englishes.

<snip>

> 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).

The problem is that the difference between standardized and
nonstandardized varieties is likely to be less than the variation within
any particular variety (standardized or nonstandardized) once you allow
this. Remember that the overlap between any (perhaps nearly
any--naturally or consciously very different nonstandardized varieties
such as Jamaican English or Cockney rhyming slang, respectively, could
be remarkable exceptions) two varieties of the same language is pretty
huge, and the differences between varieties, though of great interest to
the people on this board, are really amazingly small.

> 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.

That's not the point of sociolinguistics or dialectology. You want the
theoretical linguists--down the hall, room 12B.

<snip>

--
David Bowie                               University of Central Florida
     Jeanne's Two Laws of Chocolate: If there is no chocolate in the
     house, there is too little; some must be purchased. If there is
     chocolate in the house, there is too much; it must be consumed.

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