Peyton Manning and the Missing T Formation

Pey(t)on Manning

Thanks to my wife and Doug’s watching of the NFL playoffs, it’s come to my attention that the Super Bowl is this weekend; that one of the teams playing is the Indianapolis Colts; and that the Colts’ quarterback is one Peyton Manning. As I listened to TV commentators talk about Peyton Manning, I got to thinking about a local Utah newscast that James D. Smith brought to the attention of the American Dialect Society listserv back in November. The story was about younger speakers there “dropping their T’s”. It turned out they were talking about the pronunciation of words like mountain and Layton (a city in Utah). The transcript wrote the pronunciations as “mow-en” and “Lay-en”, and when I first read it, I wondered what the big deal was.

Among linguists, it’s well-known that in some varieties of American English, when you have a stressed syllable ending in a voiceless stop (such as /t/), a glottal stop [ʔ] is inserted before it. For example, here’s a spectrogram of me saying the word pate. (Click on it to make it bigger. I’ve also linked to a sound file — since I can’t embed sounds in the free version of WordPress — that you might want to open in a new tab or window.) The dark area labeled “ej” is the vowel; the vertical stripes correspond to the opening and closing of the vocal folds. As they approach he orange-highlighted area, they get farther and farther apart, as the vocal folds tense up and ultimately close. This is the glottal stop, labeled with a question mark because I couldn’t put the IPA symbol into the graphic. At some point during this 90 milliseconds of relative silence, I put my tongue tip into position for the [t], but that doesn’t show up: If the airstream is blocked at the vocal folds, another blockage downstream doesn’t make a difference. After the end of the orange-highlighted segment, you see a brief burst of sound, when I release the /t/.

My normal pronunciation of pate

(Sound file: My normal pronunciation of pate)

How do I know that orange segment really had a glottal stop in it, and wasn’t just all [t]? Here’s another spectrogram, of me saying pate again, this time making sure to keep my vocal folds open. This time, the orange segment containing the [t] is about 50 milliseconds long, which is average for American English. In the earlier pronunciation, the orange segment is about twice as long.

My unglottalized pronunciation of pate

(Sound file: My unglottalized pronunciation of pate)

But what does all that have to do with a “missing T”? The next well-known phonological phenomenon is that when you have a stressed vowel followed by a [t] or [d], and the next syllable ends in [n] (as in Peyton and Madden), it’s common for the vowel between the [t] and the [n] to drop out, and for the [n] in essence to act as the vowel. (In phonetic terms, it becomes syllabic.) It’s a labor-saving technique: Instead of putting the tongue tip behind the teeth to make the [t] or [d], then dropping it to let the vowel pass through, and then putting it back up there to make the [n]; you just put it up there and leave it.

Again, though, what does this have to do with a missing T? With the insertion of a glottal stop, and the [n] turning syllabic, we end up with the sequence [ʔtn] at the end of the word. In this situation, the [t] can optionally drop out, leaving just [ʔn]. It’s not surprising that this might happen. To see why, I’ll walk through what has to happen in order to pronounce [ʔtn]:

1. For the glottal stop, the vocal folds close tight, cutting off the airflow to the mouth. (Remember the first pate spectrogram?)
2. To make the [t], the tongue tip has to contact the palate right behind the teeth. Also the vocal folds have to stop vibrating, but since they’ve shut tight to make the [ʔ], this is already taken care of.
3. For the [n], the tongue tip is already where it needs to be. Two other things have to happen simultaneously. One is that the uvula, which has been parked up against the back wall of the mouth, has to lower, opening up the passage to the nose. The other is that the vocal folds have to start vibrating again.

If the silence of the glottal stop makes it hard to know when the tongue tip gets into position to make a [t] (as it did with the pate example), then who would ever know if it never showed up at all until it was time to make the [n]? All it would take would be for it to arrive a few milliseconds too late, and you’d end up with just [ʔn]. In fact, I still can’t tell for sure whether I pronounce Peyton as [pʰejʔtn] or [pʰejʔn]. I’ve put a spectrogram of me saying Peyton below, and the glottal stop, conveniently highlighted in orange again, is similar to the one in my pronunciation of pate: about 80 milliseconds of silence. You can also see that there’s no vowel between the [ʔ] and the [n]. The voicing stripes are there, and so are the dark horizontal bands (known as formants) but much fainter than they would be for a vowel. This is characteristic of a nasal consonant.

My ordinary pronunciation of Peyton

(Sound file: My normal pronunciation of Peyton)

Maybe there’s also a [t] in there; maybe there’s not. But even if a listener can definitely tell that there’s no [t], this is such a common feature of American English that I couldn’t understand why someone would be complaining about it all of a sudden now, and for just this one population of speakers. I mean, it’s not bad English to pronounce Peyton as [pʰejtʰən], but it sounds a bit stilted and artificial, doesn’t it? Below is a spectrogram of this careful pronunciation of Peyton, and the link to the sound file. There’s no glottal stop here, just a 45-millisecond closure for the [t], followed by a slightly longer interval of voicelessness (noted as [h]), then a very short but visible and audible vowel before the [n].

My careful pronunciation of Peyton

(Sound file: My careful pronunciation of Peyton)

So I finally got around to watching the news video, and when I did, I realized that people weren’t complaining about a glottalized-T-and-syllabic-N pronunciation; they were complaining about something that really was strange. There is indeed a glottal stop, and that’s not the strange part. And the actual [t] is missing; that’s not the weird part, either. The weird part is that the [n] doesn’t turn syllabic: The vowel before it stays! That is, they would pronounce Peyton not as [pʰejtʰən] or [pʰejʔtn] or [pʰejʔn], but as [pʰejʔən]. The spectrogram and sound file of me giving the “Utahan” pronunciation of Peyton are below. The glottal stop is a little on the short side, only about 60 milliseconds, but still a bit longer than my usual [t] closure. (Besides, I promise you, the tip of my tongue never touched the roof of my mouth until I said the [n]!) After it there is an unmistakable vowel, followed by the [n].

My weird pronunciation of Peyton

(Sound file: My weird pronunciation of Peyton)

To me, this pronunciation is nuts! I first heard it on Dora the Explorer, when Dora was encouraging her audience to “push the buh-un”! This must have been near ten years ago, because it’s been a long time since Doug or Adam has watched Dora. Her pronunciation annoyed me, because the only reasons for the glottal stop to be there is if you’re going to say the [t], or if you’re going to do the [ʔtn]-reduction thing we talked about above.

Now as a linguist, I know this position is untenable. There are countless cases of some phonetic environment triggering a sound change, and then disappearing, like an icicle used as a murder weapon, leaving the sound change it caused as a puzzle for historical linguists to figure out. So why should this one be so weird? It shouldn’t, but speaking as an everyday user of English, I can tell you that it is, and I can totally understand the gut reaction of people who complain about it. I their real complaint is much like mine, but without the phonetic knowledge to put their finger on what’s going on, they seize upon the “missing T” — the [t] whose absence is hardly noticeable when an [n] comes immediately after, but which glares out when what remains is a glottal stop right next to a vowel.

So what about mountain, which I’ve ignored after mentioning it in the first paragraph? That’ll have to come in another post, along with names like Horton, Clinton, and Thornton (but not Easton, Ashton, Piketon, or Clapton). In the meantime, if you find yourself having to watch the Super Bowl and wondering how to stay entertained, maybe you could listen for glottal stops and missing T’s when the commentators Peyton Manning’s name!

TV Show Mythology

As we’ve approached tonight’s final-season premiere of Lost, I’ve been thinking about the use of the word mythology to refer to the body of knowledge that is revealed over the course of many episodes for a TV show that has long-running story arcs. (I mentioned wanting to look into it a couple of posts back.) Not only has mythology developed a specialized meaning for weird TV shows, but that meaning is now spinning off its own idioms. Fans talk about “mythology episodes” of Lost, Fringe, and Alias (and their opposite, the “stand-alone episodes”). In last week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly, resident Lost analyst Jeff Jensen talks about showrunners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof realizing that a main character needed to “download a huge piece of our mythological puzzle” as they wrote an episode, and in a sidebar, the collocation of mythology and download appears again.

But where and when did our language acquire the specialized meaning of mythology that gave rise to terms like downloading mythology and mythology episode?

I first became aware of this meaning for mythology in reading articles in sources like EW about The X-Files in the 1990s, and since that time, the term has continued to be used primarily in discussions of … well, let me quote from Glen here. I asked him his thoughts on the term, from the perspective of someone in the business, and he had some good stuff. He wrote:

I think it’s still restricted mainly to shows with a fantastical element (that is, science fiction or fantasy)* in the long-term story arc. Grey’s Anatomy and The Sopranos may have long-term story arcs, but I doubt they get many people referring to their “mythology.”

Glen also had, I think, a better, more precise definition of this kind of mythology than mine. In his estimation,

“mythology” is being used to mean what we usually call “canon” — that is, facts and history that are established in text on the show, hence constituting a constraint on future storytelling.

Put that way, the definition isn’t so removed from one of the extended uses noted in the OED

c. In extended use: the received wisdom concerning a particular subject; the collective or personal ideology or set of beliefs which underpins or informs a particular point of view.

By this point, though, we’ve shifted far enough semantically from the original (or at least, earlier) meaning of mythology that it could equally well describe any show with this kind of “facts and history”, and it looks like it may be starting to. I was able to find a few hits for “Seinfeld mythology” and “Simpsons mythology” (although The Simpsons so self-consciously ignores previous episodes that using mythology when talking about it is almost a joke). And in fact, Glen found a handful for “{Sopranos, Nip/Tuck, Law & Order} mythology”. However, he found zero hits for “Grey’s Anatomy” mythology”, and I found zero for “Days of Our Lives mythology”.

Soap operas have the longest-running TV story arcs of all, so why wouldn’t mythology have developed its specialized meaning for them? One probable reason is that mythology started out with such a strong connnection to stories of the supernatural and fantastic that more-or-less realistic shows like soap operas weren’t fertile ground for such a meaning to develop. Glen has another plausible reason:

I also have a sense that “mythology” is used most often for shows that also have stand-alone episodes. That’s because fans (and creators!) need a means of referring to the special subset of episodes that deal directly with the long-term arc. This hypothesis certainly fits The X-Files and Fringe (and yes, we do refer to “mythology episodes” around the Fringe writers’ office). Lost may be an exception to this rule, inasmuch as almost every episode relates to the mythology.

In searching the Google Groups database among the alt.tv.* newsgroups, it does seem to have begun when I started noticing it, with The X-Files, in 1997 or 1998. But suspect I may not be mining this database in a way that will produce all the relevant texts, so I’m interested in your antedatings, if you have them. Commenter Stan Carey said he seemed to recall talking about Twin Peaks in terms of mythology (or maybe even “mythos”) in the early 1990s. On the other hand, posts like this post from “Devious Weasel” on alt.tv.x-files.analysis seems to point more toward a mid-90s origin:

Just dug out an old issue of Cinescape from the end of the third season [NW: this would be 1996] where [Chris Carter] is referring to the fact that [Gillian Anderson]’s pregnancy forced 1013 to develop the mythology a little faster in the second season than they would have liked. For some reason I don’t think this is the earliest reference I’ve seen to the term, but it is the earliest I have available to me.

What are some other (scripted) shows you’d describe as having a mythology? What shows would you say don’t have one?

*Glen adds: “Interesting fact: in the industry, people commonly use the word ‘genre’ as an adjective that refers specifically to sci-fi, fantasy, and other ‘weird’ genres. Lost and Fringe are genre; Law & Order is not genre, even though you might think that ‘cop show’ is a genre.”

Special Needs

Around these parts, there’s an unusual kind of syntactic construction used to express necessity. I first heard about it in a class on historical linguistics, but didn’t hear it “in the wild” (as we linguists say) until I was married and heard my brother-in-law say at a cookout,

The burgers need flipped.

That is, where I would say “The burgers need to be flipped”, this construction has the passive participle (flipped in this example) right after need. This needs done construction is one of the features of Appalachian English, although it also shows up in varieties of English north of the Appalachians. Since I heard that first example, I’ve heard many others from many people. It’s part of my wife’s dialect, so Doug and Adam have acquired it, too.

In light of my personal experience with needs done, I was interested to hear a talk at LSA 2010 by Dan Brassil called “A Middle Voice in Appalachian English”. He was making an interesting claim: That needs done is not a case of passive voice; in other words, it’s not just the same kind of structure as needs to be done with the to be omitted, as has been argued in the past. Instead, he claims that it’s an example of middle voice.

Showrunners

I’m looking forward to watching tomorrow’s episode of Fringe. I’m particularly enjoying the story arc about the alternate universe where onion rings refers to deep-fried narrow slices of potato, and French fries to breaded and fried circular slices of onion.

Oh, wait, I’m thinking about Frings.

So anyway, I’m eager to watch Fringe tomorrow because it’s the second episode that my brother Glen and his writing partner Robert Chiappetta wrote. Actually, I’ve learned from Glen that all the screenwriters contribute to a greater or lesser degree to each script, but individual writers (or writing teams, like Glen and Robert) will volunteer to draft particular episodes discussed in the planning sessions. Afterwards, the script is subject to revision by a number of people, including in particular someone known as the showrunner.

“I’ve never seen showrunner on the credits,” I said when he told me about the position.

“That’s right,” Glen said. It’s not a formal title. It’s usually an executive producer, but which person among the producers and executive producers and co-executive producers dons the mantle of showrunner varies from show to show.

Naturally, the first thing I wanted to do after learning about this new word was to see if the by-now-all-too-familiar reanalysis-plus-backformation process had created showrun as a new verb. Answer: Yes, it has! For example, a headline from Variety from July 6, 2009 says

Josh Bycel to help showrun ‘Scrubs’

The story’s lead backs up Glen’s explanation: “Scribe Josh Bycel will help perform surgery on ABC’s “Scrubs,” signing on as the show’s new executive producer.” Not only has showrun come into being as a verb via backformation, it has even progressed far enough to re-open the direct-object slot that show once filled, allowing it to be filled with the name of a particular show. Furthermore, we get a bonus with this backformation, occurring as it does with an irregular verb: We can also ask if we get the irregular past tense showran. Again, we do. This is from a forum thread discussing The Simpsons:

Other than the two episodes he showran, how much influence did David Mirkin have on the show in season 7?

One of these days, I’m also going to look into the history of mythology with respect to shows like this. From the preliminary poking around I’ve done so far, I’d say the first show to have mythology used this way was The X-Files, but I’d be happy to hear antedatings from TV fans. Twin Peaks seems like the kind of show whose fans would talk about its mythology, but I don’t recall hearing anyone do it, although I certainly find plenty of relatively recently written material that does.

Much Is Required To Them

Heard in Virginia’s Republican governor Bob McDonnell’s response to the president’s State of the Union address:

The Scriptures say, “To whom much is given, much will be required.”

Beyond noting the latest appearance of this saying, and offering the way I’d phrase it — From them to whom much is given, much is required — I can’t add to what Mark Liberman at Language Log has already said about its garbled syntax.

Witcha Pants on the Ground

Doug and Adam have been watching the American Idol auditions for the past couple of weeks. It was Doug who wanted to do it, but I figure it’s a good thing to do just for socialization purposes, like learning to watch football. I didn’t figure out until my first year in high school that the reason I’d come to school some week and hear everyone singing some new song was that they listened to the radio! And not just when they were in the car with their parents, but in their own rooms, on stations they chose themselves! Oh, and they also watched some cable channel called MTV or something, I came to understand.

I can just imagine if these American Idol auditions had been on the air when I was Doug or Adam’s age. For the past two weeks, I would have been wondering, “Where the hell did this ‘pants on the ground’ song come from, and why is everyone singing it all of a sudden?” But not Doug and Adam: They laughed at General Larry Platt’s audition when it came on, chanted it with their friends at school the next day, and found a dozen clips of it on YouTube the next afternoon.

What, you haven’t heard “Pants on the Ground”? Well, watch the video! It’s a riot: a 62-year-old African-American busts out with a rap making fun of the more ridicule-worthy aspects of hip-hop culture. It’s like the kind of rant Bill Cosby sometimes does nowadays, except funnier.

So what’s the linguistic point of all this? I’ll start by writing out the first few lines, indicating the pronunciation. I don’t think I need to go so far as to use the IPA for it; I’ll just use an apostrophe to indicate a sound missing (from the standard pronunciation), and the in parentheses to indicate a nasalized vowel in pa(n)’:

Pants on the groun’
Pants on the groun’
Lookin’ like a foo’ with yo’ pants on the groun’!
With the gol’ in your mouth, hat turn’ sideway’
Pa(n)’ hit the groun’, call yourself a coo’ cat
Lookin’ like a foo’
Walkin’ downtown with yo’ pants on the groun’, get it up!

Platt’s pronunciation has a number of features typical of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). (The following is taken from Wikipedia, in an entry backed up by many academic citations.)

1. “Homorganic final consonant clusters (that is, word-final clusters of consonants that have the same place of articulation) that share the same laryngeal settings are reduced.” Ground is pronounced groun’; turned as turn’: [n] and [d] are both made with the tongue tip; both are voiced; and the second one in the cluster disappears. Similarly for gold with its [l] and [d].
2. “AAVE is non-rhotic, so the rhotic consonant /r/ is usually dropped if not followed by a vowel.” Platt pronounces your as yo. (This is not exclusively an AAVE feature; other dialects of English are also non-rhotic.)
3. “/l/ is often deleted in patterns similar to that of /r/ and, in combination with cluster simplification (see above), can make homophones of toll and toe, fault and fought, and tool and too. Homonymy may be reduced by vowel lengthening and by an off-glide [ɤ].” Platt pronounces fool as foo (or maybe it could be spelled foow, to represent the off-glide).
4. “[F]inal consonants may be deleted (although there is a great deal of variation between speakers in this regard). Most often, /t/ and /d/ are deleted. … Nasal consonants may be lost while nasalization of the vowel is retained.” Platt pronounces sideways as sideway, and pants in what I’ve written as the fifth line as pa(n)’.

There’s also the pronunciation of the suffix -ing as -in, but that’s so common in American English in general that I’m not putting it in the above list. However, there’s one feature of AAVE that Platt doesn’t have, or at least, doesn’t use when he performs this song. As Wikipedia puts it: “Word-medially and -finally, /θ/ is realized as either [f] or [t]….” I listened to Platt’s performance on American Idol and in The View, and he’s very consistent. As far as I can tell, he pronounces mouth as mouth, not mouf, and with he definitely pronounces as with, not wif or wit.

For speakers who do pronounce with as wit, there’s an interesting consequence when it comes before a y sound. In many dialects of English, the sequence [tj] becomes [tʃ] (especially when the following vowel is [u]), an example of a process called affrication. Thus, I know what you want becomes I know whatchu want; Tuesday becomes Chewsday; and (for some British English speakers) tune becomes chune. In AAVE, wit’ you / wit’ ya becomes witchu / witcha. (But wit me does not become *witch me, and wit her doesn’t become *witch her.)

I noticed Platt’s pronunciation of with from the first time I saw his audition, because I was expecting him to say witcha pants on the groun’, and in all the times he repeated that phrase, it was always with yo’ pants on the groun’. But when Doug sings it, he puts in all the AAVE features he’s absorbed from black classmates or rap songs, and corrects with yo’ to witcha. So do all his friends, he says. “It just sounds better,” he tells me, “along with foo for fool.” He agrees that that’s not how Platt actually sings it, but suspects that most of his friends probably think it is. There are certainly lots of people on the Internet who evidently think so.

If I were a sociolinguist, I’d probably have something interesting to say about construction of identity through use of various dialect features, but I’m not. If any sociolinguists are reading this, I’m interested to hear your opinion.

Linguistics Is for the Birds!

“I’m so excited that you found lard!” my wife said. “I’ve been looking all over the place for it! How did you find it?”

“Well, first of all,” I said, “our lives must be pretty pathetic if this is what counts as excitement. But anyway, it occurred to me to look in the Mexican food aisle.” Which was true. I’d suddenly remembered a tortilla recipe that came with a tortilla maker my wife and sons gave me for my birthday a few years ago, and the recipe called for lard. And there it was, in the Mexican aisle, labeled in both English and Spanish (manteca). But before I remembered the tortilla recipe, I tried to find lard in the baking supplies aisle.

“Luckily, there was a guy stocking groceries in that aisle,” I said. “But I hesitated to ask him about lard…”

“Why?” asked Doug.

“Well, he was kinda fat,” I told him. “But it was OK. I just said, ‘Uh, don’t take this the wrong way, but is this the aisle for lard? And I really am talking about lard, I’m not trying to insult you or anything.’”

“Oh, Neal, you didn’t,” my wife said, in a tone of dismay.

“No, I just said, ‘Is this the right aisle for lard?’ and he pointed me to the shortening, and I said it had to be lard, and he didn’t know where it would be after all.”

“I know some people who would have done it like you said,” my wife said. “They’ll say, ‘No offense, but…’ and then you knock yourself out trying to figure out what they were saying that they thought you might take offense at.”

Wow. I’m glad I don’t know those people. Anyway, the reason my wife wanted lard so badly is that she and Doug are still into watching and feeding birds, enough that it has occurred to her that it would be more economical to make their own suet blocks than to buy the pre-made ones, and the recipe she found calls for lard.

Refilling the bird feeders has also become one of Doug’s regular chores, although it’s an easy one to forget when there’s snow on the ground and it gets dark early. After a couple of days of asking Doug to refill the feeders and finding out at bedtime that it hadn’t been done, my wife spoke to Doug before school one morning:

“OK, Doug,” she began. “When you get home this afternoon…”

“Yes?” said Doug.

“…while it’s still light outside,” my wife continued.

“Yes?” said Doug.

“Go out and fill the bird feeders.”

I was listening while I packed Doug’s and Adam’s lunches. “You know, Doug,” I said, “This just goes to show how one little word can change a sentence into a fragment.” I was remembering our previous discussions on this topic, and knew a teachable moment when I heard one.

“‘You get home this afternoon’ — you, subject; get home this afternoon, predicate,” I explained. “‘When you get home this afternoon’ — you know there’s more. ‘It’s still light outside’ — sentence. ‘While it’s still light outside’ — you know the main sentence is still on the way. ‘Go out and fill the bird feeders’ — now there’s your sentence!”

My wife laughed, and Doug just kind of shook his head as he cleared his breakfast dishes. That was probably the last either of them thought about it for the rest of the day. But I kept thinking about it, and at supper that night, I had to make a retraction.

“You know how I said the when and the while told you that there was more to come?” I asked Doug. “Well, maybe not. Your mom could have just said, ‘This afternoon, you’ll get home from school’: a complete sentence. But you’d still have said, ‘Yes?’ And if she’d said, ‘It’ll still be light out,’ that’s a full sentence, but you’d have still been waiting for her to get to the point.”

I didn’t get into stuff about the Maxim of Relevance, or a rising intonation at the end of a sentence instead of a falling one. I didn’t even explain the main lesson I took away: a reminder that what qualifies as “a complete thought” syntactically, maybe even semantically, is not always the same as a complete thought in terms of a real conversation.

“You’re learning how I operate!” my wife said.

Nick Impersonates Charlie

Doug and Adam like visiting their Aunt Carrie and Uncle Mark, because they have a flat-coated black retriever named Charlie that Doug and Adam like to play with. They’ll usually bring him a new toy, and Charlie is always eager to get it. He comes bounding up to the car, sniffing at us as we get out. My wife will pull the new toy out of the bag it’s in, and throw it into the yard for Charlie. He’s so used to the routine that it caused a problem one time when we didn’t bring a new toy — but did bring one of Doug and Adam’s stuffed animals. Charlie was so excited and so eager to get to work on that stuffed animal that we had to hide it in a bedroom drawer.

“Aw, Charlie,” the wife and sons were saying, “That’s not a toy!”

“Ooh, goody, let me have my new toy!” Carrie was saying, speaking as Charlie. Doug, Adam, my wife, and I sometimes put words into Charlie’s mouth, too. The Charlie voice is somewhat like the voice of the Abominable Snowman in the Looney Toons cartoons, the one who picks up Daffy Duck and says, “I will hug him and squeeze him, and call him George.”

I was reminded of this when I listened to Deborah Tannen’s invited talk at the LSA conference. She’s done a study on how family members will use other family members in order to change the tone of a tense interaction. For example, I’ve sometimes asked Doug or Adam, “What would your mother say if she knew you were walking around in the cold house with no socks or slippers on?” It’s kind of a weenie’s way out to fob off the sock requirement on my wife, but hey, it makes me look a little less like the bad guy. And besides, she really would tell them to put on socks or slippers!

Other times, people will actually imitate the other person’s voice, instead of just invoking them like I did. And it turns out that a really popular target of this kind of ventriloquizing is the family pet. Tannen had several examples of people doing this, and even wrote a separate paper just on this more specific topic, called “Talking the Dog”.

One of Tannen’s main points about talking in another person’s (or animal’s) voice is that along with the voice comes a whole set of personality traits belonging to the voice’s owner, traits that a speaker can temporarily assume in order to change the power dynamic between them and who they’re speaking to.

It was the point about a voice coming along with certain personality traits that reminded me of the Charlie voice. Trouble comes when we’re back at home, and Doug has the occasion to speak as our cat Nick. When he ventriloquizes Nick, he uses the Charlie voice. My wife can’t abide this. Nick and Charlie have two such different personalities that giving them the same voice is simply unacceptable. It bugged her so much that she even had me create separate voices for Nick and our four other cats. But Doug can’t do the Nick voice, so he’ll still sometimes use the Charlie voice for Nick. “No Charlie voice!” my wife tells him.

Well, maybe he’s not giving Nick Charlie’s voice. Maybe when he imitates Nick, he’s imitating a Nick who’s imitating Charlie! I’ll have to drop this suggestion to Doug and see how it goes over with his mother.

January Links

We’ll start off with a really cool video that’s been in the news recently (and will be featured Monday the 18th on Rachael Ray’s show): An Oregon high school rivalry led to some video challenges posted on YouTube. Student Javier Caceres got the cooperation of what seems to be his whole school, along with his video-production teacher and classmates, to do a music video. It’s a lip-sync of Hall & Oates’s “You Make My Dreams (Come True)” (featured in the movie 500 Days of Summer, which is undoubtedly how these teenagers come to be doing a video of a song from the 1980s). The linguistics-related piece is the most interesting part: Even though the song sounds normal, and the lip-syncing is pretty good (different students lip-sync with different levels of proficiency), it gradually becomes clear that this video is playing backwards, with cheerleader pompons jumping from the floor to their hands, etc. Therefore, when these actions were filmed originally, it must have been the lip-syncing that was done backwards. The story I read talked about the hours Caceres sent listening to the song and figuring out what mouth gestures the performers would have to make. This is an amazing phonetic achievement! It would have been even more amazing if they had done it karaoke-style, providing their own vocals. In that case, he’d have had to have the singers:

1. pre-aspirate their stops,
2. post-nasalize (and not pre-nasalize) vowels after nasal consonants,
3. put in [ʒ] before the [d] in the backwards dreams, and make sure not to let the [i] turn into an [I] before the [r]: [zmirʒd] (zmeerzhd), not [smIrd] (smeared). (More on that in a later post.)

But impressive, nonetheless.

Here’s a Wishydig post from 2006, on the unusual powers of coronal sounds (i.e., the ones made with the tongue tip: [t, d, n, s, z] and a few others).

On day I heard on NPR that full-body scanning “may have prevented” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from getting on the plane he tried to bomb. “Well, obviously not!” I thought. “Everyone knows he made it onto the plane!” Then I dimly remembered someone writing about how some speakers say may have in situations where people like me would say might have. I tracked it down: It was one of Jan Freeman’s blog posts, and when I found it, I discovered that Jan had imported the posts from her Boston Globe-affiliated blog to a non-Globe-affiliated blog she calls Throw Grammar from the Train.

Lastly for this batch of links is an episode of a web comic called Girls With Slingshots by Danielle Corsetto. (HT to @erthsister, via @GrammarGirl.) I was further interested in this web site because of a couple of interesting words/phrases. One was weekdaily, which describes when new episodes of GWS come out. It took me a few seconds, but it suddenly clicked and I completed the analogy: day:daily::weekday:weekdaily. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard such a useful word before. It’s in Urban Dictionary, but not yet in OED. In the FAQ, one question was whether the characters were “based off” people in real life. Corsetto repeats this phrase in her answer: based off (as opposed to based on). I’ve read about this construction before, but can’t remember where (can’t find it in Language Log or the American Dialect Society mailing list archives, though it does come up tangentially in a Linguistic Mystic post). This was the first one I noticed on my own in the wild. CoCA gives 53,590 hits for based on; 14 for based off, with the earliest from 1993. Google News Archive has earlier hits for based off, but a lot of them are examples like based off the coast of Lebanon, so I haven’t got a good fix on how long based off without a coast has been around.

More RNWs

Right-node raisings (aka “Friends in Low Places” coordinations) continue to trickle in from my readers. Here’s one from Ben Zimmer, who has contributed several of the others in the growing collection:

This past spring semester I have been living and working in Washington, DC for a congressman. (link, via Wonkette)

Parsed in parallel manner, it would mean that she lives in Washington, DC for a congressman (the weird part), and that she works in Washington, DC for a congressman (the unremarkable part).

Now for the strangest RNW yet, sent my way by Blar:

A woman has taken out a temporary restraining order against Ravens linebacker Terrell Suggs, according to online court records. On Friday afternoon, a judge ordered that Suggs cannot abuse, contact or enter the woman’s home. (link)

Taken as a parallel coordination, it would mean:

1. Suggs cannot abuse the woman’s home.
2. Suggs cannot contact the woman’s home.
3. Suggs cannot enter the woman’s home.

In context, though, the first two propositions don’t make sense. Clearly the writer means Suggs cannot abuse or contact the woman herself. So in this RNW, it’s not some adverbial phrase that wraps around the verbs’ shared direct object; it’s the possessive suffix ’s plus the possessed noun that follows. I don’t know if my analysis will cover this one or not — I’ll have to reread my own paper to see if it will.

UPDATE, Jan. 15, 2010: Oops, I forgot one that I heard earlier this week, just before a commercial on a daytime talk show:

We’ll talk to Carnie Wilson about losing and then gaining weight again.

Now it may be that Wilson has been on a weight-loss roller coaster, so that again could apply to both losing and gaining. But the then is turning me toward the RNW analysis, such that again is intended to apply only to gaining.