Language Lore

It is not altogether uncommon among the Indo-European languages to have what is called vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, by which is meant the substitution (typically, in a polysyllabic word, but not only) of a shorter and partially displaced vowel for what would otherwise, under stress, be a so-called full vowel. This happens, for instance, in standard Russian and Bulgarian, as it does in English.

The difference between the two Slavic languages and English is that whereas vowel reduction is completely regular in the native vocabulary of the former, it is subject to much variation in the latter. Thus a word like candidate can be pronounced either with secondary stress and retention of the full vowel in the final syllable, or with no secondary stress and the pronunciation of a schwa (ə) in the ultima. The character of the stress and the character of the vowel are linked: primary stress goes with full vowels, secondary stress or unstressedness with schwa. Any secondarily stressed or unstressed syllable can contain a schwa: the a in adept, the e in synthesis, the i in decimal, the o in harmony, the u in medium, the y in syringe are all schwas.

The appearance of schwas differs somewhat as between British and American English. In standard British English, schwa regularly appears in some words where American pronunciation retains a full vowel; cf. the differential phonetics of pentagon, Amazon, businessman, and even legislature. Of course, in large part the two versions of English have the same vowel in unstressed syllables, but there is a marked propensity in British speech for schwas to occur where they do not in American. This means that where American English has a reduced vowel, so will British––but not vice versa.

One of the sign functions of vowel reduction is to underscore the unity of the word, that its constituents are subordinate to the unified integrity of the word as a whole, as a gestalt. Thus when, in British but not American English, the element man in businessman loses its full vowel character in this compound, it is IN THAT MEASURE also subordinated in value to the semantic unity of the compound. This is a matter of semantic hierarchy: constituents of words are always subordinate in meaning to that of the whole word of which they are parts. Vowel reduction and concomitant absence of secondary stress are a sign, therefore, of the word’s unity, of the parts being subordinate to the whole.

The difference between British and American speech in the distribution of reduced vowels in polysyllables is not au fond a matter of mere phonetics but of mentality. By consistently reducing vowels that are unreduced in American English, British English emphasizes the value of the whole at the expense of the parts, whereas American speech tends to give equal value to the vowels of secondarily stressed syllables. This phenomenon can be interpreted as a sign––an ICON, in fact, in that word’s proper semiotic sense––of what is fundamentally an ideological difference, always necessarily historical, between the two Englishes: British English here emphasizes the superordinate historical value (unconsciously) placed by its speakers on the unity of the nation manifested linguistically, whereas American English, by giving nearly equal value to part and whole, aligns itself ideologically with its enduring history as a revolutionary product, to this day less a nation than an uneasy federation of disparate states.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

The phrase bad guys has been used incessantly by the media––and by ordinary speakers influenced by media language––as a handy substitute for enemy or terrorist in referring to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. This can perhaps be understood as a convenient covering reference to an enemy that does not belong to traditional warfare. They wreak evil and are “bad,” but they are often not soldiers in the conventional sense, since they may not belong to a conventional army.

But the use of this phrase is semantically fraught with the wrong connotations, for the following reasons. First, guy is a colloquialism that is associated with an informal attitude to the referent that is, moreover, at least stylistically neutral if not entirely hypocoristic in contemporary English. Second, and more tellingly, the phrase derives from the world of Hollywood motion pictures, where evildoers of all sorts have always been referred to as “bad guys” in opposition to “good guys” in denominating the characterological identity of the dramatis personae of movie (and, by extension, television, etc.) plots.

There is thus a strong current of trivialization whenever the enemy and terrorists are referred to by this phrase. This colloquialization has the unintended effect of minimizing the evil wrought by them, just as it is by its frequent equivalent bad actors. Both must be expunged from public discourse because any reference to the enemy or to terrorists that even subcutaneously allows for a quasi-endearing evaluation of their status can result in a weakening of the resolve to defeat them. It is thus a failure of thought that cannot be tolerated for moral as well as rhetorical reasons.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Up until a certain age American children, like children in other countries, articulate the vocables of their native language in a childish way because their linguistic abilities are commensurate with their physical development in other respects. Whereas until about forty years ago these childish speech patterns were outgrown from pre-adolescence on, it is now typical of the speech of young American women in particular to retain what used to be purely puerile traits into adulthood. This recessive infantilization of language broadly affects the vocal timbre as well as the intonation of female adult speakers, to the point where a young American woman who doesn’t sound like a superannuated child is exceptional. (Those who are familiar with female speech patterns in Japanese will immediately recognize the cross-cultural similarity to the contemporary American situation.) Whether speaking like a child into adulthood is to be reckoned an apotropaic linguistic adaptation, of a piece with other behavioral strategies calculated to forestall conflict, is an open question.

Infantilization can also affect lexis as well as phonetics. The current preference for the Lallwörter (nursery words)  “mom,” “dad,” and “kid” instead of their grownup counterparts “mother,” “father,” and “child” is clearly an example of this phenomenon. With increasing frequency, public speech (both oral and written) refers to “single mom” and “stay-at-home mom” regardless of the stylistic register of the context in which these phrases are embedded. In fact, the media routinely eschew designating parents by their stylistically neutral names. Particularly jarring is the neologism “grandkid,” connoting as it does (regardless of the age of the child) yet another instance of an American cultural tropism toward a state of permanent infantilism––here, tellingly, of both the grandchild AND the grandparent.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

While every language is rife with variation, some variants can only be adjudged to be the wayward product of a kind of tone deafness or linguistic solipsism, conditioned more often than not by an unconscious adherence to the orthographic representation of a word. To cite an example from my own linguistic milieu, I have a friend who consistently mispronounced the first name of another friend even though he heard me pronounce it correctly on numerous occasions. This was a case where the spelling -ai- of the Finnish name Raimo gave rise to the vowel in English rain instead of the vowel of line. Eventually, the insistence of the letter yielded to the aural dominance of the sound, and the name is now pronounced correctly.

But this sort of linguistic solipsism can also persist uncorrected regardless of numerous audible examples to the contrary and in the absence of spelling influence. A prominent case is the speech of President Barack Obama, who consistently pronounces Taliban with a flat first vowel, a palatalized liquid, and a broad final vowel, in what seems like an attempt to imitate a fancied foreign model taken to be “authentic.” Perversely, Afghanistan in his speech is rendered with uniformly flat A’s, but Pakistan with uniformly broad A’s.  (The latter pronunciation is doubtless an imitation of Pakistani English.) He also vacillates between pronouncing Copenhagen correctly and incorrectly, i. e., with a broad A instead of the traditional –ay- diphthong of rain––yet another instance of faux authenticity (not unknown in the speech of miscellaneous other Americans as well).

At bottom, this kind of idiosyncratic variation is a sign of linguistic insecurity. And no wonder: confronted with having publicly to render the Babel of foreign names and their variant phonetic forms in English, anyone––but especially a monolingual speaker––can easily come a cropper.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

While the near-ubiquity of interrogative intonation instead of traditional declarative intonation in subordinate clauses in the speech of young females has often been remarked, it now needs to be observed that this feature has begun spreading to the speech of young males, and not just adolescents. (It is also occasionally appropriated by not-so-young females in a pathetic effort to sound girlishly modern, as in the off-putting patois of the NPR interviewer Terry Gross.)

Although it is clear that the substitution of interrogative for declarative intonation can have the function of communicating the indecisiveness or unsureness of the speaker in making an assertion (“do  you follow me?,” “do you know what I’m saying?” also being implied), there is also a more general meaning attaching to this kind of change in intonation pattern. The deployment of the interrogative where no explicit question is being asked is tantamount to conceding in advance the rightness or force of an assertion, analogous in its purport to the typically feminine apotropaic smile that is so common in American culture. In this respect, younger males are only belatedly mimicking the self-protective tactics known to women from the beginning of time, and of increasing utility to both sexes in a milieu where predisposing or maintaining anodyne interpersonal relations is of superordinate value.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Pleonastic constructions continue to proliferate unabated. Alongside extruded adjectives like the safe of safe haven (a haven = a safe harbor), one constantly encounters phrases like skill set and data point, which represent a superfluous linearization of what would otherwise be a simple plural of the substantive, i.e. skills and data. In these latter cases, the extrusion is “rightward-branching” rather than “leftward-branching,” i .e. the hypertrophy occurs to the right rather than the left of the word affected.

One could, of course, maintain that the compound skill set is different from simple skills by emphasizing the collective nature of a set and lending itself to the enumeration of collectivities via pluralization (skill sets); and that data point captures a particular meaning––a point in a collectivity of data––that the simple plural data would not. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that the appearance of such phrases as skill set or data point is favored by the general drift of the language (i. e., a real tendency) that predisposes hypertrophic forms in general.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Contemporary American English, particularly its colloquial variant, has a tendency to delete postpositions from verbs that have traditionally required them, e.g. cave for cave in, or bail for bail out. An example of this phenomenon that is constantly heard on the radio in the responses of interviewees is thanks for having me instead of the normative thanks for having me on, doubtless influenced by the confusion attendant upon the varied meanings (with and without postpositions) of the verb to have.

It is tempting to identify all such instances of truncated postpositions with a SEMANTIC ATTENUATION of the compound verb (in comparison with the untruncated standard variant), by which is meant a meaning that falls short of the full force of the untruncated verb form by remaining noncommittal as to the completion of the action. According to this analysis, for instance, thanks for having me is aspectually incomplete or noncommittal in comparison to thanks for having me on because the omission of the postposition comports a vagueness as to what specific semantic connotation of the verb have is at stake when it is conjoined with a postposition. This analysis is akin to the one I offered of the dropping of the reflexive after the verb commit as an attenuation of the complete degree of binding or pledging designated by commit myself/oneself/themselves, etc.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

The growing power of linguistic hypertrophy in present-day American English (in particular) can be measured inter alia by the incorrect rendering of fixed phrases, wherein the traditional form is replaced by a longer one. This is happening to the normative version of the expression the last straw, which is increasingly heard as the final straw (for instance, in a report by my namesake Ari Shapiro on today’s installment of the NPR program “All Things Considered”).

Recently I was waiting to pick up some laundry early in the morning at a cleaning establishment in Westwood, Calif. when an elderly gentleman came in and said to me “the early bird gathers the worm.” I couldn’t restrain myself and corrected him: “You mean ‘gets’ the worm.” He said nothing and looked at me with incredulity.

Note the greater length of gathers vis-à-vis gets.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

One increasingly hears in the mass media the phrase good-paying job, which goes against the traditionally normative well-paying job. What may seem like yet another overextension of the adjective good at the expense of well (as in I’m good instead of normative I’m well––in response to How are you?) is actually a case of syntactic contamination, whereby two syntactic constructions that share constituents and a semantic core are confused.

The compound adjective well-paying in well-paying job is the result of transforming the phrase This job pays well. This traditional construction is contaminated by the phrase good job, yielding good-paying job, even though there is no comparable construction *This job pays good.

Ultimately, the rise of such catachrestic constructions is to be explained as part of the decline of traditional language norms grounded in a knowledge of written English.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

The rise of mass communications and the concomitant spread of literacy to previously marginalized users of a national language present a problem to language historians who have heretofore had the luxury of dismissing variation attributable to imperfect learning and outright grammatical error. That is to say, what would have been ignored as a nondatum in the past must now be taken into account, especially if it becomes a constant presence in the written language. A prominent contemporary example in American English is the reinterpretation of the plurale tantum troops––strictly a collective or mass noun in traditional usage––as a count noun permitting the back-formation of a singular, troop.

Before the advent of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the troops referred to a mass of soldiers, and the singular troop was blocked in this meaning. But with the prominent participation of the Marines along with the Army in these wars, the media followed the participants in discriminating between soldiers and marines, necessitating the use of a word that made no reference to whether the combatants belonged to a specific branch of the armed services. Herein lies the origin of the back-formed singular troop, with its status as a countable noun allowing locutions with numerals like “The insurgents killed 5 troops,” which remain ungrammatical for those speakers who adhere to the traditional norm.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO