Language Lore

Speakers of standard languages may occasionally betray their social or geographical origins by retaining a non-standard or dialectal feature in their speech as a residue. For instance, the metathetic pronunciation [aks] instead of [ask] for the verb ask in the otherwise impeccably standard speech of an educated African-American is identifiably a residual dialectism.

This sort of linguistic atavism, i. e., the retention of an anomalous feature doubtless left over from childhood, can be observed when a person’s native dialect is refurbished to conform to speech norms associated with their occupation. Public radio broadcasting is (still) one such profession. Thus, one hears in the pronunciation of the NPR presenter/host Robert Siegel (“All Things Considered,” NPR Radio) a failure to palatalize the /n/ in news, regularly resulting in the dialectal form [nooz]; and the retention of  dialectal [git] instead of [get] for get, along with the pen/pin merger, in the speech of his NPR colleague Renee Montagne (“Morning Edition”).

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Writers have no creative license to do violence to language, but in the age of depravity the scope of licentiousness extends to violations of linguistic usage, the media being a particularly fecund realm of examples. When it comes to the figurative use of language, the line between what used to be called “fine writing” and journalism has gradually been erased, due inter alia to the baneful influence of modern poetry, where catachresis abounds.

The form that catachresis takes when it comes to tropes is typically a matter of semantic overextension, whereby a dead metaphor that has been lexicalized is distended to include a nonsensical denotative referent.

Here is a fresh case:

“But others have not, and her story is entering the pantheon of secular anger building as a battle rages in Israel for control of the public space between the strictly religious and everyone else.” (Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kirshner, “Israelis Facing a Seismic Rift Over Role of Women,” The New York Times, National Edition, January 15, 2012, p. 1; emphasis added)

What has happened here is evident when compared with the etymology of the word pantheon and the senses adduced for it in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged (Merriam-Webster, 2002):

Etymology: Middle English Panteon, temple at Rome built by the Roman statesman Agrippa died 12 B.C. and rebuilt by the Roman emperor Hadrian died A.D.138, from Latin Pantheon, from Greek pantheion temple dedicated to all gods, from pan- + theion, neuter of theios of the gods, from theos god

1 : a temple dedicated to all the gods
2 : a treatise on the pagan gods
3 : a building serving as the burial place of or containing memorials to the famous dead of a nation
4 a : the gods of a people; especially: the gods officially recognized as major or state deities b : the persons most highly esteemed by an individual or group

That two journalists and their editors, for whom writing is presumably their stock in trade, could conceive of pantheon as the metaphorical locus of anger is a failure of thought tout court––and a particularly telling one for the current state of American English in its pragmatistic dimension.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Linguists have always been tempted to explain language change by appeals to economy of effort (alias the principle of least effort) whenever the latter seems plausible, but the meretriciousness of such explanations is also easily detected. A good case in point is abbreviation, i. e., the appearance of a shorter form of a word or phrase.

As has been illustrated in more than one earlier post, clear cases of functionality involving economy of effort aside (what sane person would say “the John Fitzgerald Kennedy International Airport, please” to a cab driver instead of “JFK, please”) when a word or phrase is shortened, the most common stylistic outcome is the creation of emotive or affective value by comparison with the original (unshortened), neutral form, an outcome that is especially prized in advertising (both print and broadcast). This applies to acronyms as well as other types of abbreviation. However, when acronyms or other abbreviations become so common as to efface their unabbreviated progenitors from most speakers’ memories (take NATO, for example), what originally could have been ascribed to economy of effort as well as to a stylistic impulse fades from memory and assumes common currency without an attendant stylistic value. This is what happened over time, for instance, with knickers < knickerbockers.

Abbreviations continually arise in spontaneous speech, and these neologisms typically need time to take hold. Here is a contemporaneous example extracted from a real-life speech scenario involving the recent introduction of grands as an affective (emotive, hypocoristic) derivative of grandchildren. When a trainer in his twenties used grands in a sentence inquiring after the progeny of his seventy-two-year-old client, it took even a linguistically sophisticated auditor to request a restatement of the question before the trainer’s meaning became clear, as the client was encountering grands for the first time.

The point of this exchange has nothing to do with economy of effort and everything to do with the semiotic value of abbreviation, which is typically affective. The trainer’s choice of grands instead of grandchildren (thankfully, not the odious grandkids) was clearly in the service of expressing a shared attitude of endearment grounded in an abductive inference (in the Peircean sense) that the designation of the client’s progeny with a hypocoristic abbreviation would be stylistically more appropriate in this informal context than would the unabbreviated, linguistically neutral form.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Transitive verbs are verbs that govern direct objects without the intervention of postpositions, whereas intransitive verbs are those that do not require or cannot take a direct object. In contemporary American English, especially in the language of advertising and the media, there has been an extended trend toward the transitivization of traditionally intransitive verbs, as in “ski Bromley,” “shop Target,” “surf the web,” “lean Republican,” etc., all of which constructions, strictly speaking, are missing postpositions (i. e., “ski on Bromley [Mountain],” “shop at Target,” etc.). This trend was illustrated yet again on the front page of today’s issue of The New York Times: “Mr. Reid said he would vote [instead of "vote for"] Huntsman in the Republican presidential primary on Tuesday.” (Jim Rutenberg, “Ready or Not, Huntsman Faces His Moment in New Hampshire,” January 8, 2012, Late Edition, p. 1).

The omission of the postposition has the effect of increasing the emotive force of the verbal action on the direct object. The intercalation of a postposition between the verb and the object makes the latter necessarily indirect. The indirection of verbal force accompanying intransitivity, by comparison with transitivity, can be reversed by simply changing the grammatical category of the verb and dropping the postposition. Closing the distance between verb and complement in this way––as with all instances of relative closeness between governing and governed form––eventuates in a rise in emotive value, and it is precisely this value that is at a premium in language styles that aim at predisposing the utterer/writer to the listener/reader.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

As mentioned in earlier posts, English has a regular––and productive––alternation of the position of stress in verb/noun pairs, e. g., combát vs. cómbat, defáult vs. défault, procéed vs. próceeds, etc. In each such pair, the verb has stress on a non-initial syllable, whereas the noun has it on the initial.

This contrast extends beyond dissyllabic words to embrace verb/noun pairs consisting of more than two syllables, e. g., envélop vs. énvelope, interchánge vs. ínterchange, reprimánd vs. réprimand, etc. Even though in some of these cases the stress need not contrast––réprimand with initial stress does double duty for many speakers as both a verb and a noun––the important and unalterable fact is that no matter how many syllables the word has, if there is a contrast at all, the stress in the verbal form will be NON-INITIAL, i.e. be on one or more syllables closer to the end than in that of the nominal form. Moreover, and just as importantly, THE REVERSE IS NEVER TRUE: there are no English verb/noun pairs which contrast by having an initial stress in the verbal form and a non-initial in the nominal form.

Where a non-initial stress is retained in the nominal form, it tends to acquire stylistic value, such that this (unproductive) variant is necessarily associated with formal or neutral diction by comparison with an extant (productive) variant that is associated with informal or colloquial style. This is the case with items like defáult vs. défault: the first form is typical of a neutral or high style, whereas the second occurs in informal or colloquial contexts, the latter typically including the vernacular of sports.

Moreover, once the colloquial variant gains general ascendancy, it may become terminologized, by which is meant a specialized occurrence as a constant feature of a certain sector of the vocabulary. Thus, no person familiar with the jargon of sports would ever confuse offénse ‘a violation or infraction of a moral or social code, etc.’ with óffense ‘the means or tactics used in attempting to score, etc.’; or defénse ‘the act of defending against attack, danger, or injury’ with défense ‘means or tactics used in trying to stop the opposition from scoring, etc.’ (Note in these particular cases that the verb differs from the noun by having a d in final position [offénd, defénd].)

The drift of the language is just as straightforwardly clear, viz. toward the regularization of initial stress for BOTH grammatical categories regardless of stylistic differentiation. This is the overall trend which accounts for the emergence not only of non-standard nominal variants like défault or óffense but the replacement of traditional non-initial stress in verbs like frequént by contemporary innovations with initial stress. This historical trajectory is evidently to be explained by what can be called the THE LAW OF THE SUPERSESSION OF THE MARKED BY THE UNMARKED, which dictates that, ceteris paribus, linguistic oppositions distributed contextually only by the markedness value of the terms tend to generalize the unmarked value regardless of context.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

When the constituent structure of a word or phrase fades over time, i. e., when the meaning and resultant separability of the constituents cease to be transparent to the speakers of a language, the word or phrase may be conflated with another one, whose meaning is similar, leading to variants that are not on a par orthoepically. This is what has happened with the phrase on behalf of in the recent history of (American) English.

More and more in public discourse, instead of on the part of in its strictly instrumental (agentive) meaning speakers substitute on behalf of, whose traditional meaning is ‘for the benefit of; in the interest of’ rather than ‘as the agent of; on the part of’. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed., 2006) records this substitution and (typically) makes no distinction in its Usage Note:

Usage Note: A traditional rule holds that in behalf of and on behalf of have distinct meanings. In behalf of means “for the benefit of,” as in We raised money in behalf of the earthquake victims. On behalf of means “as the agent of, on the part of,” as in The guardian signed the contract on behalf of the minor child. The two meanings are quite close, however, and the phrases are often used interchangeably, even by reputable writers.

But as the etymological data in the Oxford English Dictionary Online entry give one to understand, the present-day ascription of purely instrumental meaning to on behalf of, by which this phrase is equated with on the part of, is a misconstrual of its structure. Here are the two relevant etymologies, for half and behalf:

Etymology: A Common Germanic n.: Old English healf (feminine) = Old Saxon halƀa (Middle Dutch, Middle Low German halve ), Old High German halba (Middle High German halbe ), Old Norse halfa (hálfa), Gothic halba side, half . . .The oldest sense in all the languages is ‘side’.

Etymology: Used only in the phrases on, in behalf (of), in, on (his, etc.) behalf , which arose about 1300, by the blending of the two earlier constructions on his halve and bihalve him, both meaning ‘by or on his side’ . . . By the mixture of these in the construction on his bihalve, . . . previously a preposition, and originally a phrase, be healfe ‘by (the) side,’ became treated, so far as construction goes, as a n., and had even a plural behalfes , behalfs in 16–17th cent. The final -e of Middle English was the dative ending. In modern use, construed either with a possessive pronoun (in my behalf), a possessive case (in the king’s behalf), or with of (in behalf of the starving population); the choice being determined by considerations of euphony and perspicuity. Formerly of was sometimes omitted.

The explanation for the misconstrual and resulting conflation of the two phrases is to be sought in the opacity of the word behalf, which has no currency outside of the two idiomatic phrases noted.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Many languages exhibit voiceless vowels, by which is meant the pronunciation of a vowel sound in certain contexts without the vibration of the vocal bands. Voicelessness typically precedes vowel loss, as in English lone from alone or round from around. This sort of phenomenon can be observed in the speech of Barack Obama, who routinely either unvoices or drops the initial vowel in America(n), as does the (cloying) radio host Ira Glass (“This American Life”), illustrating what is called APHESIS, defined as the loss of a short unaccented vowel at the beginning of a word.

The loss of a vowel and/or an adjacent consonant can also occur in the middle or end of a word, in which case it is called syncope (medial syllables, as in bos’n for boatswain) or apocope (final syllables, as in sing < Old English singan). Such phonetic processes are first observed historically in colloquial or allegro tempo varieties of speech (for instance, the so-called loss of the “jers” [= supershort vowels] in medieval Slavic) and are then generalized to all styles regardless of tempo. In Japanese the high vowels i and u are regularly syncopated between voiceless consonants in all styles unless emphasis is called for, in which case they can be reinstated in lento tempo. French routinely syncopates medial vowels in neutral (elliptical) speech (cf. maintenant, etc.), reinstating them when called for in explicit style.

What vowel loss illustrates is the INDEXICAL FUNCTION of contextual variation in language. Aphesis and syncope are always tied to specific phonetic contexts, and they are thus SIGNS––INDEXES, to be precise––of both the value of the vowel involved, on one hand, and the value of the consonants in the segmental context, on the other. This semiotic grounding of the phenomena at issue insures the solidarity between rules and contexts, absent which the phonology of a language––like all the components of grammar––would not be the coherent system that it is.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

All languages have meaning fields, which is to say that words enter into associative networks formed by connotative variants that extend basic dictionary meanings into semantic nooks and crannies that accommodate subsidiary concepts. In the European languages that share Latin and Greek etyma as historical points of departure, post-medieval and modern developments do not necessarily dovetail, producing interesting differences in semantic utilization of recognizably similar or identical roots. An interesting case in point are the Latin and Greek antecedents of two common words, grammar and letter, in English and Russian.

In English the word grammar is given the following etymology in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed., 2006):

Middle English gramere, from Old French gramaire, alteration of Latin grammatica, from Greek grammatikē, from feminine of grammatikos, of letters, from gramma, grammat-, letter

In Russian the word is grammatika (грамматика), which adheres more closely to the Greek etymon. The latter, as it is captured in the above etymology, derives from the word for ‘letter’, which shows us how rules of language structure (alias grammar) and the symbols of written language were directly associated in Greek derivational morphology.

Our English word letter, by contrast, has the following Latin etymology (also from the AHD): “Middle English, from Old French lettre, from Latin littera.” The adjective literal and the substantive literature no longer maintain the double t of the original and have departed from the Latin sense to configure the modern meanings we have today that are still rooted in the concept of being “lettered.”

In Russian, the word litera, also from the same Latin patrimony, now has only a somewhat recondite meaning, viz. ‘letter’ (archaic) and ‘type’ (the typographical entity), although the word for ‘literature’ is practically the same as in English, namely literatura. Whereas English uses literal to mean ‘adhering strictly to the letter’, by contrast Russian resorts for this meaning to the adjective bukval’nyj, derived from the word bukva ‘letter’, which is of proto-Germanic provenience (whence E book; cf. G Buch ‘book’) and shows up as a borrowing from the same source and with the same meaning in all of the Slavic languages.

Russian deviates from Germanic and Romance, however, in how it treats the word borrowed from another version of Greek gramma, namely grammata (pl.) ‘letters’. This comes into Russian as a singular noun gramota (грамота), with the primary meaning ‘letters, the alphabet’, as in (учиться грамоте) ‘learn one’s letters’, i. e., ‘learn how to read and write’, whence the adjective gramotnyj ‘literate’.

It is at this point that English and Russian part company when it comes to associative meaning fields, and just here we can discern how words determine not just thought but one’s forma mentis, depending on the semantic peculiarities of one’s native language.

Where English uses the word competent to denote either the person or the product that shows a certain level of skill or accomplishment, the older and (practically) demotic word for this concept in Russian is gramotnyj (грамотный), although kompetentnyj also exists as a newer vocabulary item. There is thus a strong association in Russian between being ‘lettered’ and being ‘competent’ that is scanted in English, despite the extended meaning of literate. This gives rise in Russian to phrases like gramotnyj kompozitor ‘competent composer’ and gramotno napisano ‘competently composed’ [of music] which define a whole conceptual field that is denied to its English counterparts.

One would be hard put to find a more perspicuous proof of pragmatism (in the Peircean sense) than this differential mapping of associative fields in the two languages.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

The contemporary ubiquity of absolutely as the expression of a high degree of affirmative emphasis (instead of yes, oh yes, very much, etc.) is often accompanied by a hypermetrical stress on the initial syllable, which means that the stress of this anapestic adverb becomes spondaic, i. e., with a ternary foot bearing two stressed syllables instead of one. Incidentally, this case of spondee resembles the more general expression of emphasis in French, where the obligatory stress on the ultima is augmented by a second stress on the initial syllable, as in fOrmidAble or mErveillEUx (capitals signifying stressedness).

The occurrence of the spondee in the anapestic word absolutely is to be explained as yet another discursive implementation in English of the poetic function (focus on the message for its own sake), structurally of a piece with alliteration, with which it shares the feature of repetition of identical elements, here manifested in its most basic form, that of DOUBLING, and as a prosodic rather than a segmental feature. In turn, the possibility of spondee helps explain the otherwise unmotivated rise to monopoly status of absolutely as the preferred form of emphatic affirmation in contemporary English.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

There is a sound in English called a GLOTTAL CATCH or GLOTTAL STOP, which is a stop consonant articulated without release and having glottal occlusion as a secondary articulation, as in the Scottish articulation of the sound t of little, bottle, etc. This sound is present in nearly all dialects of English as an allophone of /t/ in syllable codas and is symbolized orthographically as an apostrophe, e. g., sto’p, tha’t, kno’ck, wa’tch, lea’p, soa’k, hel’p, pin’ch, etc. It also occurs in word-final position, where it is represented with a p, as in yep for yes and nope for no. To generalize, the incidence of a glottal catch at the end of a syllable is a kind of APOCOPE, i. e., a truncation.

It is also a PHONOSTYLISTIC datum, in that it is characteristic of informal speech and is not normative of neutral or formal style. In this respect, as a species of truncation (of the syllable), it fits into the general pattern whereby informality is achieved via ABBREVIATION vis-à-vis its formal counterpart.

One aspect of informal or colloquial style is the AFFECTIVE meaning of abbreviation, specifically its close association with the phenomenon known as HYPOCORISM (as in baby talk). This form of endearment is typical, for instance, of pet names, wherein abbreviated versions of their full neutral or formal counterparts are the norm.

In this light it becomes clear why the word football is commonly heard uttered by ardent fans and followers of the sport with a glottal catch for the t ending the first constituent of this compound, whatever the stylistic context or the utterer’s dialectal profile. In such speakers’ value system football is a hypocoristic, hence to be pronounced uniformly––regardless of context––with a phonetic feature answering to a term of endearment.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO