Language Log

This morning on the radio, I heard this from Therese Madden of FIT:

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"We are Food Justice…"

That's just one of the chants heard on the lawn outside of the Independence Visitor Center on a recent Saturday afternoon. The hot sun did nothing to damper the enthusiasm of the 120 young people, mostly between the ages of 15 and 20.

Eric Kleefeld, "Wis. Dems: Internal Polls Show Us Winning The State Senate", TPM 8/2/2011:

TPM asked a follow-up regarding internal polls for the two extra races for August 16.

"Our two Democratic incumbents, Bob Wirch and Jim Holperin, are in very, very strong shape," said Tate. "They are better well known than our opponents, they are better liked than their opponents." [emphasis added]

Reader SL asks for intervention in an disagreement about whether newspapers should use "gonna" in quotations:

I got in an argument with a colleague, who used to be a journalist, even, about this. She said there is nothing wrong with transcribing what someone says accurately. My point is that this is a clear case of diglossia in English; everyone always says "gonna" but it should always be written as "going to". She disagreed, and I said, "Well, I'm going to write to Language Log about that." Actually, I said "I'm gonna", but I wouldn't write that.

Marc Lacey, "As Arizona Fire Rages, Officials Seek Its Cause", NYT 6/11/2011:

Deep within the burn zone, while trying to extinguish the more than 600-square mile Wallow Fire, firefighters have taken care not to trod on two small areas in the Bear Wallow Wilderness where smoke and flames were first spotted a mile or more apart on May 29. Those two fires quickly merged into one big, unruly, runaway blaze that eludes containment nearly two weeks later. (emphasis added)

In standard formal English, I believe, that should be "to tread on"; "trod" is the past tense form, with the past participle being "trodden" or "trod". (The editors of the New York Times agree with me, apparently, since the online article has now been changed to read "tread on" — so here is a screen shot of the original.)

This use of "very not appreciative" caught my eye on Sunday:

“I’m very not appreciative of the way she came in here,” Ted Shpak, the national legislative director for Rolling Thunder, told the Washington Post.

This construction is not in my own dialect; it reminds me of the recent broader uses of "so". ("I'm so not ready for this", which I had perhaps mistakenly been mentally lumping together with "That's so Dick Cheney" or "That's so 1960's".)

I'm not sure what's changing, "very" or "not" or both. I suspect that "not" may be moving into uses previously reserved for "un-".

Today's political buzz is all about the win by Democrat Kathy Hochul in New York's 26th congressional district, encompassing suburbs northeast of Buffalo and west of Rochester. National issues, particularly the debate over Medicare, played a big part in the race, but local factors were key as well, with the Republican candidate, Jane Corwin, losing votes to Jack Davis, a third-party spoiler running on the Tea Party line. Hochul was helped by squabbles between the Corwin and Davis campaigns, most notably a confrontation between Davis and Corwin's chief of staff outside a veteran's event a couple of weeks ago. The video of the confrontation memorably featured Jack Davis saying, "You want punched out?"

What is this woman saying, and where is she from?

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For several American listeners, these have turned out to be surprisingly difficult questions. I'll give the answer and the broader context later today.

Last night, Connecticut beat Kentucky 56-55 and advanced to the NCAA title game in men's basketball.  As a hoops fan who grew up near UConn's campus, I was paying attention.  And I already knew that the two coaches, UConn's Jim Calhoun and Kentucky's John Calipari, had a long-standing personal rivalry. What I didn't know, until I read about in during the run-up to the game, was that the rivalry has a linguistic dimension.  According to Greg Bishop, "Coaches Calhoun and Calipari share a genuine dislike", NYT 4/1/2011:

The contentious relationship between Connecticut’s Jim Calhoun and Kentucky’s John Calipari is perhaps the longest and most entertaining coaching feud in college basketball. It started so long ago that Calipari has held five jobs since. […]

[T]heir first major act of competition […] went to Calipari, then a young, brash hotshot at the University of Massachusetts who in 1993 went to Calhoun’s state and plucked a high school center from Hartford named Marcus Camby. […]

Calhoun considered Calipari an outsider with no background to talk about basketball in New England. He mocked Calipari, calling him Johnny Clam Chowder — pronounced with an “er” at the end, not an “ah” — and not behind his back.

At this point, many readers will need some background on chowders and rhoticity.

In comments on my post about Tim Pawlenty's recent Iowa performance, various people have raised the question of vowel quality ([i] vs. [ɪ]) as opposed to consonant place ([ŋ] vs. [n]) as a feature of the phenomenon commonly (though misleadingly) known as "g-dropping".

This issue, though part of the folklore of sociolinguists, has not gotten the attention that it deserves, perhaps because it doesn't fit gracefully into the traditional intuitive frameworks of the relevant fields. In particular, it involves three areas where the boundary between symbols and signals gets blurry: vowel reduction, vowel-consonant coarticulation, and consonant-consonant assimilation.

As a result, discussing the topic will take us on a trip through some odd corners of English phonetics, phonology, and sociolinguistics. So consider yourself warned.

In a comment on "Pawlenty's linguistic southern strategy?", Jonathan Mayhew asked

Does anyone else hear him say "gitting the job done"? Is that a Southern thang?

Tim Pawlenty's speech on March 7 to the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition suprised many observers, and not entirely in a good way. Dana Milbank, "With Pawlenty's Iowa speech, a side of syrup", Washington Post 3/9/2011, wrote

… Pawlenty is campaigning as if he's some sort of Southern preacher. At the Faith & Freedom event, he was dropping g's all over the place, using "ain't" instead of "isn't," and adding a syrup to his vowels not indigenous to Minnesota. He didn't utter the word "jobs," made only passing reference to economic woes, and instead gave the assembled religious conservatives a fiery speech about God, gays and gynecology.

Or Jeff Zeleny, "Campaigning as All Things to All Republicans", NYT 3/12/2011

The knock on Mr. Pawlenty, according to conversations with voters, is that his speeches sound sincere but do not always sizzle. At a faith forum last week in Iowa, he displayed vigor. But the next day at the Statehouse, the talk among several Republicans was that it seemed he had suddenly developed a Southern accent as he tried connecting to voters by speaking louder and with more energy.

The political blog of Radio Iowa heard it too and noted, “Pawlenty seems to be adopting a Southern accent as he talks about his record as governor.” As he spoke of the country’s challenges, he dropped the letter G, saying: “It ain’t gonna be easy. This is about plowin’ ahead and gettin’ the job done.”

Helen DeWitt writes with a question about "afterward(s)" and "backward(s)":

I've had comments back from my editor on a book that is to come out in late October.  He mentioned that when he started going through the document he changed "afterwards" to "afterward" and "backwards" to "backward" but later stopped, so the words could be left as they stood. It might, he thought, be better to be consistent (the text was not entirely consistent).

The word protesters has for obvious reasons jumped into abnormally high-rotation on the news radio dial, and to my surprise, many of the members of the media (on NPR and the BBC) that I've heard use the word are pronouncing it protésters [pʰɹəˈtʰɛstɚz] rather than the way I would pronounce it, prótesters [ˈpʰɹoʊˌtʰɛstɚz]. (Please ignore the r-coloring I've indicated on the last vowel, which reflects my r-ful pronunciation; it's the difference in stress that I'm interested in.) I think I've pinpointed both the justification for pronouncing what I'll arbitrarily call "the media's way" and why I pronounce it my way; read on below the fold if you're interested, and let us know what you think in the comments.