Language Lore

A wide range exists among speakers as concerns the degree to which they are aware of the extant differences in speech at any given point in a language’s development. These disparities are due to variation in speakers’ knowledge and experience, including awareness of etymology (word origins). Also, speakers differ in their alertness to stylistic variation, including the kind that is conditioned by overlapping generations and the attendant linguistic peculiarities (dynamic synchrony). Older speakers may preserve features that are regarded as archaic by younger ones.

Here are two examples, the first from Russian, the second English, taken from recent viva voce exchanges, where in each case there is a wide gap between the interlocutors’ age.

(1) A woman art historian/curator in her mid-thirties, born and bred in Moscow, remarks on what she recognizes and immediately labels as a refined word use in the diction of a male native speaker (a scholar) in his early seventies, whose speech reflects pre-Revolutionary usage no longer commonly heard among the Russophone public. Specifically, he has used the verb испариться ‘evaporate’ in a metaphorical sense that the art historian comments on as exemplary.

(2) A restaurant customer in his early seventies says to a waitress in her mid-twenties, “I like the wine,” to which the waitress retorts, “It’s a nice red,” pronouncing red with the vowel [æ] so that it rhymes with bad instead of the normative sound of bed. She is doubtless unaware of the fact that her pronunciation of /e/ as [æ] between consonants marks her speech as belonging to the newly emerged variety of American English heard particularly frequently from young females. To the customer’s ear––given that he is a linguist with a detailed knowledge of language history and contemporary dialectology––the waitress’s pronunciation registers immediately as a departure from the norm connoting all manner of possible inferences about his interlocutor’s background.

These examples illustrate not just the probability of a differential consciousness of linguistic features in actual use between speakers but of their sociolinguistic upshot for the salient role language plays in determining the value system conditioning human communication.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

No matter what the language, the speech of women and men differs (to a greater or lesser extent depending on the language, traditional Japanese, for example, being an extreme case), even though all human beings in a homogeneous social group tend to speak like each other. Biological sex is a determinant of speech production, in the first place, because the size of the organs involved in articulation (like the larynx, the oral and thoracic cavities, etc.) are typically larger in men than in women. Women, therefore, normally use a higher register (pitch) than do men to produce speech sounds, although under special circumstances (like falsetto or castrato) men and women are both capable of speaking with uncharacteristically high or low pitch.

In contemporary American English, because of the general tendency among younger women and girls in particular toward apotropaic strategies (the “apotropaic smile” being one such largely unconscious device), the increasingly dominant place of articulation in the buccal cavity is toward the back. This gesture involves retracting the lips and narrowing their aperture, all of which constricts the vocal tract and contributes to the  impression of constraint on the hearer that is notably absent in the speech of males of the same age.

As an ensemble with the intonational and vocal timbre peculiarities of contemporary female speech noted in earlier posts, these apotropaisms can only be evaluated as an atavism that runs semiotically athwart––and threatens in part to undermine ––the aims and gains of the women’s movement.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Greater than normal force in the stressing of a word is the most common way of producing emphasis, which in American English concomitantly produces a lengthening of the stressed vowel (“That doughnut was sóoo good!”). There is, however, a slightly different way of heightening emphasis, and that is by reducing to zero the number of contiguous unstressed vowels between stressed syllables. It is, in fact, this way that has led to the supersession of the phrase “Thanks very much” over the last decade or more by “Thanks so much.” Because the combination very much is trisyllabic and tending toward an anapestic pronunciation (stronger stress on the third syllable), one currently hears much more frequently its equivalent “Thanks so much,” in which the relevant phrase is dissyllabic and prosodically iambic.

The emphasis the word so imparts to the phrase so much is enhanced by the latter’s being monosyllabic, exceeding that imparted by its anapestic alternate, with its unstressed medial syllable. In an age when all forms of linguistic hypertrophy are gaining at the expense of plainspokenness in American English, this particular case of emphasis is especially interesting because the quantitative criterion (here: fewer syllables) yields to the supervening prosodic one in exemplifying the continuing drift toward overdetermination in the contemporary language.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

American public discourse is full of clichés, especially of the figurative kind, so that shallow phrases like “low-hanging fruit” and “kick the can down the road” are inevitably to be met with at every turn. In fact, there are certain speakers––not just politicians or persons in the media––who cannot put anything into words without resorting to locutions of this sort. By extension, the use of figurative expressions from one stylistic domain in referring to material in another––for instance, calling a physician’s practice a “hustle” (without any necessary pejorative connotation)––is to be regarded as yet another prevalent form of linguistic self-indulgence.

In all such instances, what we have in current speech is a tilt toward meaning by indirection, which amounts to an avoidance of precision. Plainspokenness and direct designation of concepts and actions are sacrificed at the altar of what is erroneously taken to be enhanced expressiveness, whereas all that this discourse strategy achieves is a reliance on clichés and dead tropes that exposes their utterers’ fundamental impoverishment of thought.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

There are some speakers of American English for whom the plural of process involves altering the inserted unstressed vowel of the desinence {-s} from [ɨ] to [iy] so that processes is pronounced [prɔ́sɛsíyz], as if it were a word of Greek origin via Latin, like basis or thesis or hypothesis, which regularly alter the last vowel to form plurals without adding a desinence (thus pl. bases, theses, hypotheses).

Noting that the regular alternation of the final vowel occurs in abstracta that belong by definition to originally learnèd––and hence stylistically elevated––vocabulary, the pronunciation of processes as if it were similarly of Graeco-Latin origin (which it is not) can only be adjudged a HYPERURBANISM (hypercorrection), in that speakers who resort to it (subconsciously) analogize its inflectional morphology to that of analysis or neurosis rather than glass or ace. Whether this mistaken plural form should also be considered an affectation––as with all hyperurbanisms––is in the ear of the beholder.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Where communication of information or reference are not the main focus of speech, the classical rhetoricians conceive of language, broadly speaking, as serving the ends of persuasion, but they do not speak of language as power. However, it is obvious that speakers vary in the degree to which their utterances are adjudged to be well-formed stylistically, and not just grammatically. When speech is acknowledged as rising to the level of ELOQUENCE, it becomes an instrument of power, specifically as a means of establishing the speaker’s PRESTIGE. Practically, then, prestige as power can be increased linguistically in the measure of the speaker’s eloquence.

Contemporary American speech, both public and private, is characterized, however, not by eloquence but by DISFLUENCY or DYSLALIA. What is meant here by these two terms is not their clinical sense (‘impairment of the ability to produce smooth, fluent speech’; ‘a speech defect caused by malformation of or imperfect distribution of nerves to the organs of articulation’), but a species of linguistic INEPTNESS (‘an interruption in the smooth flow of speech, as by a pause or the repetition of a word or syllable’); more specifically, by the inability to speak well, which involves word choice more than delivery.

The analogy with musical performance is particularly apt. A musician who does not have a superior technical command of their instrument will produce a disfluent, inarticulate, ineloquent performance, just as a speaker who does not have a superior command of their language’s vocabulary and syntax will produce inarticulate utterances (without any necessary violations of grammatical well-formedness).

Casting aside clinical terminology and expressing oneself in Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, those who habitually speak their mother tongue in a TONGUE-TIED manner––their number is now legion––not only subvert the referential function of language but, more importantly, lessen their prestige and hence their power.

It is interesting, in this connection, to compare Russian to American English. Notably, where English has no such designation in ordinary speech, Russian has a specific word for inarticulacy, косноязычие, which is a Church Slavonic compound noun consisting of the two lexical elements ‘stagnant’ + ‘tongue/language’. The very fact that such a word exists in the ordinary lexicon of Russian connotes a different SOCIAL SET (attitude) by speakers of Russian toward their language from those of English speakers. In practice, there is no gainsaying that even Russian children and adolescents––not to speak of adults with a fully developed command of vocabulary and syntax––are typically much more articulate than their American counterparts and exhibit none of the disfluencies that mar the latter’s utterances.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

In recent years there has been a marked tendency among younger speakers of American English for the alveolar flap [D], which is the sound that appears as the contextual variant of the phonemes /t/ and /d/ before unstressed syllables, to be replaced with a full stop [t] and [d]. Thus, the word student, which in standard/traditional American English is pronounced with an alveolar flap preceding the unstressed vowel, is heard in the speech of adolescents and young adults with a fully plosive [d] instead of [D]. Concomitantly, in this speech variant the unstressed vowel in student has a lesser degree of both quantitative and qualitative reduction, meaning that it approximates to its stressed variant [ɛ] as in tent, instead of the normative [ə] or [ɨ] in position after primary stress.

The probable reason for the eclipse of the alveolar flap in this position is not difficult to find. It has to do with the decline of fully reduced unstressed vowels throughout contemporary English pronunciation, a tendency spearheaded by younger speakers, possibly due the influence of the printed/digitized word. There is, more specifically, a symmetry or parallelism between the semiotic value of reduction in the consonant and reduction in the (post-tonic) vowel. The alveolar flap is, after all, a reduced variant of the basic plosive sound, in the sense that flapping is an attenuation of the acoustic and articulatory force that characterizes the unflapped, fully plosive basic variant t or d. Similarly, an unstressed vowel is a reduced contextual variant of the basic vowel. In both cases, therefore, it is a reduction that occurs, illustrating the linguistic principle which dictates that units and contexts (and their variants) are always governed by PATTERNS OF COOCCURRENCE.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

In the contemporary American English of adolescents and young adults (typically, females), the word like is a constant presence, mostly as a disfluent filler or discourse marker. Observation viva voce of raw speech specimens yields the following typology of functions of the word, in rough order of frequency.

(1) ticastic: for many speakers, the word is a verbal tic (whence the nonce adjective “ticastic”), replacing “you know” and its congeners, and having no other function than as a meaningless filler;

(2) phatic (perhaps as a sub-species of the ticastic): keeping the channel of communication open, sometimes for no other reason than to forestall a response from one’s interlocutor(s);

(3) quotative: as a prefatory marker before the report of someone else’s utterance(s) or inner speech;

(4) approximative: as a means of qualifying the extent or validity of the word or phrase immediately following, including its literal meaning;

(5) anaesthetic: as a way of deflecting the assertory force of anything following, usually as an apotropaism.

At bottom, all these modern-day extensions derive from and are parasitical on the word’s original meaning and its membership in the grammatical categories of adverb, preposition, and conjunction. What unites these originary uses is the fundamental sense of SIMILARITY underlying them. While it might be ontologically defensible to assert that some degree of similarity is characteristic of all relations, in this case what is being undermined is the very concept of IDENTITY. More precisely, the promiscuous extension of like in contemporary speech can be seen as yet another manifestation––here, linguistic––of the general historical tendency in American culture toward the LEVELING OF ALL HIERARCHIES.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Every now and then, no matter how large one’s vocabulary, one encounters a word in a recondite text that requires a special effort to pronounce (to oneself) because of its exoticism. Thus, when reading the introduction to Proverbs in The Jewish Study Bible, I came upon the title of the Egyptian wisdom book, Instruction of Amenemope, and stumbled over the third word before settling on the correct stress on the antepenult.

Contemporary linguists are enamored of saying that language is “rule-governed,” by which they mean that the surface phenomena––just like the correct stress in Amenemope––are the predictable result of applying a rule that governs the assignment of primary stress in an English pentasyllable of the type anadiplosis, i. e., the sort of learned vocabulary that is derived from our Graeco-Latin patrimony.

This notion of language being governed by rules, typically of the form “IF – THEN,” i. e., “IF this structure, THEN this outcome,” no matter how apt descriptively, is theoretically utterly misleading, since what determines the assignment of the stress in the word at issue is ANALOGY, specifically the force that a pentasyllabic segmental structure (the fact of its having five syllables) exercises on the suprasegmental (prosodic) structure. More generally, it is the pattern of the analogical relations between syllabic structure and prosody (stress distribution) that determines where the stress is to be placed in a word.

The mechanicalist conception (as in modern physics) that holds sway in contemporary linguistics when theorizing about the structure of language is fundamentally misguided because it attributes the facts of language use to mechanical (efficient) causes instead of recognizing them for what they are, the results of a real tendency toward a type of outcome, i. e., the results of a final cause (in the Peircean sense,) which is precisely what is meant when one invokes analogy as explanans.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

A ‘portmanteau word’ (alias ‘blend’) is a word formed by blending sounds from two or more distinct words and combining their meanings, e. g., smog from smoke + fog. Apparently, the word portmanteau was first used in this meaning by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass: “Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy’.‥ You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.” The etymology (according to the Oxford English Dictionary Online) is from Middle French, French portemanteau ‘officer who carries the mantle of a person in a high position’ (1507 in Middle French), ‘case or bag for carrying clothing’ (1547), ‘clothes rack’ (1640) < porte- porte- comb. form + manteau manteau n. In the British English of Carroll’s time, a portmanteau was a suitcase. In modern French, a porte-manteau is a clothes valet, a coat-tree or similar article of furniture for hanging up jackets, hats, umbrellas, and the like.

As I sat contemplating my navel this morning, I suddenly remembered a portmanteau word created (with her nonpareil linguistic sprezzatura) by my late wife Marianne Shapiro to describe just my situation, namely moldiferate (mo[u]lder + proliferate), which is an intransitive verb meaning ‘to waste one’s time doing nothing while decomposing spiritually’. Another one of her creations in that vein is pestiferate (pestiferous + -ate), which she coined to mean ‘to cause to be pestiferous’. Neither word is in the OED, but they should be.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO