The Innovative Usage Thread

[TaylorS]

My gawd your dialect makes mine seem conservative with its past participles - lol.

It's crazy, I just pay attention and it seems that people here really spam -en on our irregular PPs, LOL!

[Travis B.]

My gawd your dialect makes mine seem conservative with its past participles - lol.

It's crazy, I just pay attention and it seems that people here really spam -en on our irregular PPs, LOL!

Mine makes up for it with its diachronic phonology, though.

As for -en, most of the cases I see you use sound grammatical to my ears, but still feel a bit odd if I actually try to say them by themselves.

But then, it is already established that my dialect does interesting things with tense and aspect with regard to alternate past participle forms, and I have already noticed that often forms sound odd to my ears if I say them in a contrived sentence or by themselves, but which I will catch myself using repeatedly in Real Life, and in usages that I find grammatical in retrospect as well.

For instance, callen sounds quite odd to me if I say it by itself, but in many actual example sentences I can think of it sounds quite natural to me.

Your dialect doesn't attach aspect (and/or tense) to these past participle forms, does it, though, as far as I can recall?

[faiuwle]

Hypothetical innovation rather than actual innovation, but I saw someone on a forum write "spos to" instead of "supposed to", which, except for using <o> for /o/, more or less matches the way I pronounce that. I'm now imagining a future English where "supposed to" has morphed in a new modal verb spost(a|u|o), which works just like "must" and "should".

[----]

And then must reduces to an evidentiality affix.

[Travis B.]

Hypothetical innovation rather than actual innovation, but I saw someone on a forum write "spos to" instead of "supposed to", which, except for using <o> for /o/, more or less matches the way I pronounce that. I'm now imagining a future English where "supposed to" has morphed in a new modal verb spost(a|u|o), which works just like "must" and "should".

I'm used to sposta being an informal way of writing supposed to myself.

[äreo]

I recently encountered this example of advanced English plosive lenition on a chan, that is, in text:

"...but it's very simple in princible."

[äreo]

As well, I've heard, and even seen written/typed, /ˈɒd.vi.əs(.li)/ <odvious(ly)> for obvious(ly). Somewhat common in this part of Texas, at least among teenagers.

[Ser]

I recently encountered this example of advanced English plosive lenition on a chan, that is, in text:

"...but it's very simple in princible."

The problem of using a chan post as evidence is that there's plenty of non-native English speakers too, and you have no way to find out where any anonymous poster is from...

On the other hand, I'm surprised how widespread it is here in Vancouver to drop the /d/ in "I dunno", often spelled "iono" or "ionno" in my circle of friends at least.

[finlay]

it's widespread everywhere

[Ser]

Seriously, the more I hear (HK) Cantonese, the more I'm getting convinced phonologists who've described its pronunciation must've been talking BS with all that "the plosives are never voiced" thing. Even worse, it seems there's some undergoing intervocalic spirantization with /p, t, k/ similar to that Spanish, especially with /k/. Every other 個 or 嘅 ([kɔː33] and [kɛː33] in theory) has [ɣ-]. "That book written in French" 嗰本用法語寫嘅書 [sɛː35 ɣɛ3 ɕyː55] for the last three.

Also, there seems to be some free variation in the pronunciation of some words with [iː] or [ei], so 你 (canonically [lei23]) is sometimes pronounced [li:23]. Bauer and Benedict (1997) mention some surprise at some older dictionaries listing a number of words with the rhyme [-i:] who have apparently changed to [-ei] today, but no traditionally [-ei]-ending word changing to [-i:]. (EDIT: my girlfriend seems to stigmatize it as something old people say. Interesting!)

Also, the canonically [-œːŋ] rhyme is sometimes pronounced as a diphthong, [-œʊŋ]. So 香港 "Hong Kong" is sometimes pronounced [hœuŋ55 kɔːŋ35].

Intervocalic /h/ is sometimes lost too. 好可爱 "very cute", canonically [hou35 hɔː35 oiː33], also [hou35 ɔː35 oiː33]. Especially when the word before has /h/ too, I think (好可 above, 好好 "quite nice" [hou35 ou35]...).

My girlfriend seems to use [tɕ] in almost every position of /ts/. Everywhere except before [-a:-] rhymes or [-ɐ-] rhymes. The traditional description of Cantonese says it only happens before [-i:-], [-ɪ-] and [-y:-] rhymes Bauer and Benedict, though, say it also always happens in [-œː-] and [-ɛː-] rhymes (and are confused as to why Yue-Hashimoto (who described /ts/ the traditional way) says it only happens before [-i:-], [-ɪ-] and [-y:-] rhymes), plus adding to have surprisingly encountered a speaker who had [tɕ] in every /ts/ without any apparent exception.

Final canonical [-t] is sometimes merged with a following syllable-initial [s-] to form some geminate [s:] too.

The stress pattern doesn't stop make me think of French either, where the last syllable of some phrase seems more prominent than the others (except for syllables with the high [55] tone, which sometimes seem to drag it?), but so far I haven't seen anybody commenting on that. Either stress is irrelevant "because it's a tonal language" or "there's no stress in Cantonese"...

[äreo]

I just heard my friend pronounce "deodorant" emphatically with a [t] for the second /d/.

[Travis B.]

it's widespread everywhere

And found very widely in cases of don't and in some varieties doesn't and/or didn't too, happening most commonly after any pronouns ending in vowels.

[faiuwle]

Overheard this morning: "I think my bus catches at 11th [street]."

[Astraios]

That's cool. xD

Unrelatedly, I've found myself using "why that" instead of "why" or "the reason that" in things like "... and that's why he did it".

[----]

I'm in the US, and I heard a person with non-rhotic speech--I don't think they were born in Britain because they didn't have any of the other telltale signs of a British accent.

[Wattmann]

I'm in the US, and I heard a person with non-rhotic speech--I don't think they were born in Britain because they didn't have any of the other telltale signs of a British accent.

There are non-rhotic areas of the US, you know

[----]

But this isn't one of them. The way they spoke wasn't really any different from natives of this area except they tended towards non-rhoticity.

[Rui]

Maybe they are originally from a non-rhotic area, but grew up in the area that you're in now, so that they mostly sound like a person from your area, but with non-rhoticity. I know this happened to me (I'm originally from Queens, NY, but grew up in CT, so I have a generally GenAm accent, but with NY vowels, and rhoticity), so it likely could have happened to this person.

(Granted, it's also likely that this didn't happen, but there could be a specific reason for the non-rhoticity)

[----]

Well they were African American so they were speaking AAVE, I don't know if that is non-rhotic sometimes or not
I really don't know, I just got caught off guard hearing non-rhotic speech around here.

[Rui]

AAE tends to be non-rhotic. Although the fact that they sounded like they were from the area is interesting, meaning they probably don't have other AAE features, or?

[Travis B.]

What I commonly observe is that African Americans will commonly speak non-rhotically in varieties other than AAVE, for instance they may very frequently preserve non-rhoticity in what is otherwise General American. It should be noted that not all non-rhotic speech by African Americans is actually AAVE by any means.

[Astraios]

Hmm. This isn't exactly innovative, or even English, but:

I had a presentation to give in Hebrew class today, and I had a webpage open on the computer with it projected onto the screen behind me. The video clip I was showing was about halfway down the page, so I had scrolled down to there. The tutor stopped me at one point, and asked me in Hebrew to "move it down a bit", so she could see what else was on the page. So what did I do? Obviously (I thought) she meant for me to scroll down, so I scrolled down. Then she said (still in Hebrew): "No no, down." So I was confused and looked up from the computer at her, and she was looking at the projector screen behind me, and she was saying "down" - but making upward hand gestures. So I scrolled up, thinking nothing but "Huh?!", and she read a bit and then let me carry on.

It was only a while later that I realized she'd meant "make the picture itself move downwards", not "move down the page". I've never heard anyone else use that way of saying "scroll up" before, not even in Hebrew. Has anyone else?


EDIT: And yes, she was definitely saying "down", it wasn't just me making a mistake with the Hebrew.

[finlay]

There's increasing confusion between the two due to smartphones, I think, which would actually have you pulling the picture downwards – on the computer, by contrast, you move your viewport of the page upwards. On the latest Mac OS it's set by default to use the smartphone behaviour, which confused me no end when I tried to scroll a page and it went the wrong way.

[TaylorS]

My gawd your dialect makes mine seem conservative with its past participles - lol.

It's crazy, I just pay attention and it seems that people here really spam -en on our irregular PPs, LOL!

Mine makes up for it with its diachronic phonology, though.

As for -en, most of the cases I see you use sound grammatical to my ears, but still feel a bit odd if I actually try to say them by themselves.

But then, it is already established that my dialect does interesting things with tense and aspect with regard to alternate past participle forms, and I have already noticed that often forms sound odd to my ears if I say them in a contrived sentence or by themselves, but which I will catch myself using repeatedly in Real Life, and in usages that I find grammatical in retrospect as well.

For instance, callen sounds quite odd to me if I say it by itself, but in many actual example sentences I can think of it sounds quite natural to me.

Your dialect doesn't attach aspect (and/or tense) to these past participle forms, does it, though, as far as I can recall?

I haven't noticed any aspect stuff with regards to it around here, but that could be from not paying attention enough.

[Travis B.]

And on that note...

Today I caught myself using a past participle gaven for give instead of given, clearly intending the same aspect with gaven as I have when I use aten instead of eaten.