Friday, June 01, 2007

Standards of linguistic inquiry







Consider the following skeleton:

- Some people say [Q].
- Who says [Q]?



  1. But, haven't you ever made a conscious change to part of your speech pattern? -- maybe not quite phonology (though it wouldn't surprise me)... but certainly grammar?

    When I was a kid (or should I say, "where I was a kid"), people in my neighborhood and at school always said "lay" when they meant "lie," and "laid" when they meant "lay," and so on... but my mom, a grade-A grammar-nut, kept correcting me until I finally realized it might be fun to "sound smarter." So that can't be dismissed as geographical, can it? Of course, sounding smart can also make you sound incredibly vain to trained ears, and in an English department, I worry more about that faux pas than I do about poor grammar.

    It's hot -- I'm going to lie out now for an hour by my new pool. Haha...

    (**Second thought: in other words, what about anamolous speakers who do not accept the speech patterns of their community?)

  2. Absolutely. People make conscious choices about their language all the time.

    But it takes a specific body of data to support any claims that we know something about the reasons for these choices.

    Someone with a well-trained ear can listen to a speaker and identify which patterns are natural and which are stylized or affected; but that's still not saying much about the speakers intentions.

    And it's even fine to try an figure it out. But that's creeping outside the mien of phonology.

  3. I wouldn't say impressions are inherently out of place, but simply that claims without known backing should be referenced as such.

    There is value in these impressions because areas of research and lines of investigation have to be established at some point in time; after all, many hypothesis start start by being someone's impression, one day leading somebody in some field to ask the right questions to finally give a statistical probability of how likely it was said subjects were trying to sound smart. (Such, 2007)

  4. That's fine. But it's not phonology.

  5. LOL -- you have an "it's" error in this post. ;-)


Thanks for reaching out.
