polyglot conspiracy

Some semesters, you just aren’t into it. Right?

Has anyone else seen There Will Be Blood yet? Daniel Day-Lewis’s dialect sounds more-than-vaguely like Darrell Hammond’s Sean Connery…discuss.

No seriously, has anyone thought about or read a decent account of what historical basis there is for DDL’s linguistic portrayal? (Immigration patterns, migration patterns, etc…) It’s got some interesting features, including retroflex fricatives, not much postvocalic /r/, and some vowels way further back than I’d expect. Also, William Bandy sounds like he’s from Michigan but then says “water” like he’s from Jersey (nowadays). What?

On a fairly related note, I’m reading Thomas Paul Bonfiglio’s Race and the Rise of the American Standard - *hightly* recommended.

OK, so somehow I completely missed the boat on this last year:

Such semiotic dissonance!

Not about linguistics, but today, a member of my university community who I will not name made the following comment:

Here at Michigan, it’s easy to get students to write summaries. They’re good at writing summaries, and it’s easy to get them to do it - this is not some community college where you’d have to give them pizza and rewards to get them to do it.

I was pretty upset by this. First of all, this was said in a context of pedagogical exploration, in which one of the ostensive goals is to teach us (graduate students) how to teach undergraduates in such a way as to improve their academic performance and experience, in particular their academic writing. I do not take it as one of our goals to uphold a false dichotomy of good v. lazy students that is based on superficial, institutionalized, economically-driven notions of “prestige.” I would furthermore like to think of this as something that prepares me to take on challenges of teaching in ANY academic setting, not just the golden halls of UMich.

Second, as a fellow grad student pointed out, in my experience there is not one out-of-classroom event at UMich that does not include some culinary enticement. On the above-undergraduate level, people don’t go to talks and expect no food. People don’t go to department meetings and expect no food. People don’t generally do service-related activities unless they are forced into it, or there is food (there are clear exceptions to this, but still). But oh, look at us, we’re so lucky to be at Michigan, where all the students do all their work all the time and we don’t have to do anything to prod them; thank goodness we’re not at Washtenaw where the students might have things other than college to worry about sometimes or just not feel like paying tens of thousands of dollars every year so that they can be judged by pretentious, condescending instructors. Sheesh.

I have lately started noticing that people often ask me if linguists study or teach about the “misuse of language.” I am never quite sure how to respond, so I usually just change the subject. The truth is I am not sure what this phrase even means, and I never feel like asking for clarification because I fear the worst (i.e., “You know, people who don’t speak proper English”), and even what I presume is the best possible meaning (i.e., “You know, using rhetoric to dupe people into voting for unjust wars”) does not make me particularly interested in responding. When you hear someone talk about the “misuse of language,” what do you interpret them to mean?

I thought this piece of graffiti, found on the mean streets of Ann Arbor, was brilliant:

Last night I watched (finally; it’s been a goal for a while) Pasolini’s Accatone, which is in Italian with English subtitles. Unfortunately, because it’s an old film, the subtitles are in white font and thus very often diifficult to read against the bright white atmospheric background of black-and-white Italy. But I could make out enough to get the general gist of things (along with my by-now extremely rusty knowledge of Italian), and also enough to notice something odd with some of the subtitling. Whenever the English translation demanded a modal + have, the have was represented in the subtitles by of. So you got, unexceptionably as far as I noticed, things like:

You should of told him sooner.
I could of been killed.
We would of already seen him. 

(Those are made-up examples - I tried to replay the movie just now to take screenshots, but my computer isn’t cooperating - what’s new?!) In colloquial English speech these haves would be cliticized onto the modal, so you’d have:

You should’ve told him sooner.
I could’ve been killed.
We would’ve already seen him. 

Many people hear these as sounding much more like of than have; it’s probably often written as of and so is eggcorn-like, though I don’t see it listed in the Eggcorn Database, and since it’s such a functional word instead of a substantive one, maybe it hasn’t gotten a lot of attention.

But what’s strange to me is how in a translation and subtitling situation, this got represented as of instead of have. I always presumed that subtitling or dubbing translations worked from the written script, in which case I don’t know how anyone would ever get of instead of have, unless they had just learned the auxiliary have as of, which would be extremely curious indeed. The way I figure this got in there, instead, is that someone was actually translating the film by sound rather than print, and the person entering the text for the subtitles was not the same person as a the translating speaker. So the subtitler transcribed what the translator said, and the translator was saying things colloquially, so that ‘ve sounded like of. For a native English speaker, this actually reads ok, because we *know* that these sound alike and maybe we’re even aware of the potential alternative representations. But I wonder if reading these constructions would make sense for a nonnative speaker, given that of in English is pretty much only ever a preposition? 

OK, news flash, M-W actually does list of as a verbal auxiliary, but with the following definition:

nonstandard : have — used in place of the contraction ‘ve often in representations of uneducated speech [I could of beat them easy — Ring Lardner] 

So it’s used in eye dialect, basically, to index nonstandardness. Maybe you could argue that the subtitlers of Accatone were trying to do something like this, representing something about the characters’ speech (they’re in Rome, which AFAIK is not where whatever’s considered “standard” Italian is spoken) through the English translation, but that seems far-fetched, and there are lots of other cues that probably could’ve gotten this across as well.

One of the first things you do in an introductory syntax class is learn all sorts of fun diagnostics for when you have grammatical constituents, that is, words or groups of words that act together as a unit in terms of the structure of the sentence. For locating verb phrases (VPs), one of these diagnostics is a substitution test of the type that replaces the alleged VP with the phrase do so. For instance, you can have things like:

Maybe John went to the club, but I would never do so/go to the club. 

So basically, do so stands in for a VP. This actually became a joke amongst some members of my cohort last year, when one of our nonnative English speaking colleagues thought it was very funny (for whatever) that people might ACTUALLY say do so in normal conversation, not just as a nifty syntactic analysis trick. But in normal conversation when you say “do so” it generally has a pretty clear VP that it’s being proxy for, whether it’s occurred earlier in the same sentence or just earlier in the same discourse. So when I saw this quote in an article in yesterday’s NYT, it struck me as a totally mangled reportage of do so, lacking structural context and sounding really incomplete. Bolded part is the kicker:

“There have been some conversations, I can say that,” said Senator Ben Nelson, the moderate Nebraska Democrat. Mr. Nelson, who invited Mr. Obama to campaign for him in 2006, said he has not yet pulled the trigger on an endorsement but that he was more inclined to consider one now since two Senate Democrats - Joseph Biden of Delaware and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut - had dropped out.“When there were four of your colleagues, it certainly made it virtually impossible to do so,” he said earlier this week. “You get to two and it is just a little bit easier.” 

I have no doubt that Nelson actually said this, but I’m guessing there was a specific VP articulated pretty directly beforehand, either by Nelson or the reporter, that explained what exactly was being done (or not being done). I assume it refers to endorse a candidate, though what you can gather from the preceding reported context is something like pull the trigger on an endorsement, which just seems silly.

Over break, I heard one of my cousins say two things that completely amazed me, in that I didn’t realize they were part of whatever dialect she and my family members in Missouri speak. They seemed unremarkable to everyone else in the room.

First:

Do you think the light needs on?

This is like the prototypical Ohioan The car needs washed, but sounded way weirder to me because the whole main verb is elided and what’s left for the needing is simply a preposition. Whoah!

Second:

You mightn’t oughta go…

This is not terribly surprising because I know that the dialects in MO have double modals, but the negation in there caught me off guard (shouldn’t oughta wouldn’t have caused the same reaction, I think, and google agrees that it’s far more frequent than mightn’t oughta).

This is the traditional first-of-year filler post to let you know that I’m still here despite seeming not to be here. I’ve got miles to go before I’ll be mentally ready to start the next semester, but the semester already started two days ago, so I’m already behind. Short semester breaks are the evil thematic flipside of the otherwise glorious Michigan Time.

The only marginally notable thing that has recently happened is that the McDonald’s in Marshall, Missouri proclaimed, once again this year (3rd year in a row), that “MCRIB IS BACK.” So awesome. Otherwise, I have just been etoxing and eating and spending QT with family, old friends, locals, and my cat.

Soooo, I hope your holidays were fun-filled and relaxing, and let us toast to the imminent blogability of 2008. Cheers!