• Monthly Archives: February 2019

The Lability of Grammatical Categories in Contemporary American English

February 14, 2019

In the twenty-first century, what used to be rigidly distinct in the grammar of American English––namely, the morphological distinction between verbs and nouns––has loosened so that verbs can easily serve as nouns without any change in form and vice versa. Thus the noun gift has come to be used as a verb (e. g., “X gifted me with Y”), and the verb build as a noun, as in computer lingo (e. g., “Choose how you get Insider builds,” from the Microsoft update page). To a linguistic purist like Y-H-B, this completely insouciant crossing of previously impervious categorial boundaries is stylistically anathema and not to be adjudged felicitous. Hoswever, there is evidently a semantic need that is being filled by such innovations, and younger speakers use them without any qualms. O tempora, o mores!

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Broad and Flat A in American English Redivivus

February 12, 2019

A reporter on todays’ NPR broadcast of “Morning Edition,” in speaking about the political troubles in Spain over Catalonia, was heard pronouncing the word Catalan with two broad a’s (as in want) in the first and last syllable instead of the normative flat vowel [æ] (as in fan). The reporter (a woman) had evidently never heard this word pronounced correctly and, therefore, took it to be marked (i.e., conceptually restricted), for which the marked broad vowel occurs de rigueur in contemporary American English.

Apropos, readers of this blog are reminded that among the PDFs on the upper portion of the homepage there is the link to my article, “Broad and Flat A in Marked Words,” American Speech 72.4 (1997), 436-439, which to this day provides the definitive explanation of the phenomenon at issue.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO