dialectology in linguistics

[Damien Hall]

Jon said:

'More seriously, I suppose one could argue that "plea" sounds desperate and
inferior while "plaidoyer" (if you know what it means) sounds dignified,
worldly-wise, and confident.

Unless you're French.

(Another possibility - that it sounds pretentious and absurd and
intentionally mystifying - need not be discussed.)'

Pretentious, moi?

Seriously, a plain-Google search, restricting the results to sites in
English, turns up a couple of relevant results among the first ten (no time
to look further than that):

Benoist C, Germain RN, Mathis D. _A plaidoyer for systems immunology_.
Immunol Rev. 2006 Apr;210:229-34.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16623774

_Plaidoyer for Transpersonal Psychology: Theoretical and Practical
Importance of Its Findings_. Text with no author or date given.

http://www.stanislavgrof.com/pdf/Plaidoyer.for.Transpersonal.Psychology.pdf

'Relevant hits' obviously exclude those from French-English dictionaries
and other metalinguistic sources, and also sites which Google thinks are in
English but aren't: the first ten results 'in English' contain one site in
French, but I suppose this is a matter of individual sites' metadata not
being correct or complete.

The OED also has citations for _plaidoyer_ in English ranging from 1649 to
1999. In the relevant ones of these, and in the websites I've found, the
meaning is the one I intended: not merely a plea, but an earnest plea
designed to make the hearer see the value of something overlooked, usually
an argument, method or something else theoretical or evanescent. This was
what I meant to convey; I don't know (or can't off the top of my head think
of) any other single word that does the job unambiguously in English.

My use of the word in my ADS-L posting was no doubt influenced by my
earlier use of it when I retweeted the Language Log posting - Twitter, of
course, being a context where pithiness is all! (I was, admittedly, rather
pleased with myself for coming up with it, but I maintain that it is the
best word for the job, and not merely pretentious, whether number of
characters matters or not.)

Both this sense and the more ordinary, 'inferior' one are available for the
French word, depending on context.

Damien

--
Damien Hall

University of York
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Heslington
YORK
YO10 5DD
UK

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