I’ll start with the steamy gay sex talk from an on-line messaging site — sensitive readers are hereby warned about this content — and then go on to focus on a non-standard syntactic construction in this exchange, what the YGDP (the Yale University Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America) calls the Needs Washed construction (using as a label an instance of the instruction), involving a PSP complement of a head V.
Archive for the ‘Sociolinguistics’ Category
Non-standard sex talk
May 26, 2017Books from Stanford
February 13, 2017Recent books from Stanford-connected authors, some my colleagues, some my former students (so I have warm feelings). Two in sociolinguistics / educational linguistics, one on the (gasp) morphosyntax-phonology interface.
NPR team and the perils of transcription
April 16, 2013Yesterday on NPR’s Morning Edition, a piece announcing a new NPR feature:
NPR Team Covers Race, Ethnicity And Culture (by David Greene and Gene Demby)
NPR this week is introducing a new team that will cover race, ethnicity and culture. Code Switch is the name of the new blog. Code-switching is the practice of shifting between different languages or different ways of expressing yourself in conversations.
Greene and Demby chat for a while about code-switching, with examples, bringing in linguist Tyler Schnoebelen as a consultant at one point. But if you read the transcript rather than listening to the segment, you might be puzzled.
Pronouncing names
October 15, 2012In the NYT on Saturday, a front-page piece (“Missouree? Missouruh? To Be Politic, Say Both”, by Sarah Wheaton) about the pronunciation of names, with a political connection.
The geek voice?
January 25, 2012Arne Adolfsen recently reported on Facebook that he’d been hearing the hit television show The Big Bang Theory. (Yes, hearing, not listening to, and certainly not watching. The show goes on in a room next to the one he’s in. He avoids it, because he hates the very obtrusive laugh track, an antipathy I sympathize with.) He’s formed the opinion that all of the male characters are gay, because of the way they talk [because of the phonetics of their talk. which is all he has to go on — see comments]. (Possibly relevant fact: Arne is gay.) Yet they’re all presented as straight — and awkwardly pursuing women — and the actors playing them all seem to be straight in real life [which is to say: there’s an apparent disjunction between orientation as perceived from phonetics and orientation as presented in the story — again, see comments]. Where does Arne’s impression come from?
Christians
January 20, 2012On television, an ad for ChristianMingle.com begins “Single Christian? Good news!” and promises to “Find God’s match for you”. What does the noun Christian mean in this context? Not, I am sure, what NOAD2 says:
a person who has received Christian baptism or is a believer in Jesus Christ and his teachings.
and certainly not the very broad sense in this quote from Anita Loos’s A Girl Like I (NY: Viking, 1966), pp. 195-6:
This small bouquet of words is quite insufficient to express the fondness and gratitude I shall always feel for Joe [Schenk]; it often strikes me that one of the best Christians I’ve ever known was a Jew.
Loos’s noun sense is the one related to a use of the adjective Christian that NOAD2 characterizes as informal:
having or showing qualities associated with Christians, esp. those of decency, kindness, and fairness.
Instead, Christian dating and matchmaking sites are using a much narrower sense of Christian, roughly ‘evangelical Christian’, with a specific sense of evangelical that excludes much of mainstream Christianity.
The Queen’s Christmas Message
December 20, 2011Damien Hall on the Variationist List today noted that the Queen’s Christmas Message will soon be upon us, and pointed to research on changes in the Queen’s variety of English over the years, using these broadcast messages as data.
The way the press reported this research is a story in its own right.
LOLcats and captions
December 18, 2011From Corry Wyngaarden va Chris Ambidge, a link to a recording (with slides) of “I can has language play: Construction of Language and Identity in LOLspeak”, a presentation by Jill Vaughan and Lauren Gawne at the Australian Linguistics Society annual conference 2011: a paper on LOLcats as language play and as construction of double identities, as a cat and as a savvy internet user.
The LOLcat genre displays text (usually in a characteristic font) associated with cute cat photos (or in later developments, other photos, as here). Though it’s displayed as a caption, the text, with its language play, is the point.