No vs. nope

[Laurence Horn]

On Mar 10, 2013, at 7:07 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 5:06 AM, Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>> Why Do People Use Nope
>
> "… the glottal stop. Some object to the idea, though the comments on
> the language log post confirmed a glotalized p."
>
> Many dekkids ago, perhaps as far back as the late '40's, I read a
> couple of sentences by an Englishman WRT _yep, nope_. The author
> described them as peculiarities of American English characterised
> <har! har!> by termination in a glottal stop, faut de mieux,
> represented by  _-pe_ in the orthography.
>
There's more recent stuff by Nigel Ward (another Englishman, if memory serves), a paper on grunts that I read back when I was trying to figure out what's going on with "uh-huh", "unh-unh" & Co.  He's actually written a bunch of stuff that may be relevant to "yep" and "nope":  http://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/pubs.html.  There's also a classic paper of Bolinger's on the subject in American Speech, but maybe someone mentioned that earlier.

LH

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