Proceed with caution
A long-standing topic on the American Dialect Society mailing list is
the use of
ancestor to mean
'descendant'. Recently, our attention has expanded to
include
successor
'predecessor'. Which reminded me of
precede/proceed as used by some
students in intro linguistics courses. And then of problems with
the technical terms
progressive
and
regressive assimilation.
Directionality is hell.
I briefly
mentioned
ancestor/descendant, along
with
yesterday/tomorrow and
subsequent/prior, back in
2005. And then, last July, I
commented
on forward-looking, backward-looking, and double-sided lexical
items, taking off from temporal
since
and
before in a case where
the former seems to have been used for the latter:
Standard English has forward-looking since and backward-looking before, but no double-sided
temporal P, one covering both directions. In a roughly similar
fashion, standard English has forward-looking tomorrow and backward-looking yesterday, but no double-sided
temporal adverb, meaning 'one day from today'. Such lexical items
aren't unnatural [and double-sided temporal adverbs, meaning 'a day
from today', do occur in some languages, with the actual reference
determined from context] ... but we'd expect them to be relatively
rare, since they're less informative than the more specific
items. Still, a double-sided temporal P would have its uses,
allowing speakers to view things from either end of a time span ...
One way to view apparent switches of directionality is to see them as a
reflection of a desire for double-sided lexical items. One item
in a pair (A and B) is chosen (on the basis of frequency or salience)
to serve for both, giving the effect of a switch, though in fact the
chosen item now serves in both its original use and the reversed use:
ancestor 'ancestor, descendant',
yesterday 'yesterday,
tomorrow'. Typically, most people "switch" in one direction,
using A for B, though some people will go in the other direction, using
B for A. So far as I know, you don't find people with a true
reversal, A for B
AND B for A.
1. Ancestor. A couple of
examples from ADS-L discussions. From David Bergdahl on 12 June,
citing an MSNBC.com
article
on tracing descendants of the Lost Colony in Virgina:
Fred Willard, director of the Lost
Colony center, said some colonists may have migrated inland to what are
now East Lake, Chocowinity and Gum Neck. Researchers plan to use cheek
swabs taken from possible ancestors to test the paternal and maternal
DNA lines.
And from Bonnie Taylor-Blake on 24 June, citing a front-page
story
in the
Atlanta Journal Consitution
that day:
RACE RELATIONS: PIECING TOGETHER THE
PAST, SHAPING THE FUTURE: A rose blooms from dry soil.
An unlikely, close-knit bond develops between ancestors of slaves and
the ancestors of their slave masters.
I'm assuming that these writers would also use
ancestor for actual
ancestors. That is, for them
ancestor
means 'lineal kin'.
Finally, from Brians's
Common Errors
under ancestor:
When Albus Dumbledore said that Lord
Voldemort was "the last remaining ancestor of Salazar Slytherin," more
than one person noted that he had made a serious verbal bumble; and in
later printings of Harry Potter and
the Chamber of Secrets author J. K. Rowling corrected that to
"last remaining descendant." People surprisingly often confuse these
two terms with each other. Your great-grandmother is your ancestor; you
are her descendant.
2. Successor. On 17 December, Charlie Doyle posted:
It's somewhat like the confusion of
"ancestor" with "descendant"--
In yesterday's newspaper an AP story by Hillary Rhodes reported that
the name "Emma" for new babies, after three years in first place, has
been overtaken by "Sophia" and "Isabella":
Sophia has more of a Latin or
continental appeal than its proper English successor, Emma
(Athens [GA] Banner-Herald,
E12).
Unlike the "ancestor"/"descendant" pair, however, "successor" and
"predecessor" do have the same root ...--a circumstance that might
contribute to their confusability.
It's not clear that most speakers appreciate that
successor and
predecessor have the same root, but
no doubt they do appreciate the phonological similarity, and
phonological similarity is a strong contributor to word confusions.
3. Proceed. This one's in
Brians and in
MWDEU, but in
short entries that treat the issue as mostly a matter of
spelling. But the situation is more interesting than that.
My experience in intro linguistics classes is that when we're talking
about phenomena that have to do with the context in which some element
occurs and with the influences of surrounding elements in such
contexts, and I use the terms
precede
(as in "X has the variant Y when it precedes Z" -- i.e., Y for X
in the
configuration XZ) or
is preceded by
(as in "X has the variant Y when it is preceded by Z" -- i.e., Y for X
in the
configuration ZX), some students press the verb
proceed into service as the
converse of
precede.
So: "word-final vowels are voiceless when proceeding a voiceless
consonant;
vowels are nasalized when proceeded by a nasal consonant." (I
THINK
the passive version is more common than the active, but I haven't
collected real data.) The usage appears especially in phonology,
but sometimes in morphology and syntax as well.
Now, the converse of
precede
that I myself use is
follow.
The students aren't getting
proceed
from me (or any other linguistics instructor, I'd wager). What
they're doing, I think, is "fixing" the non-parallelism of
precede (Latinate) and
follow (Anglo-Saxon) by extending
the 'next' sense of Latinate
proceed
(
We proceeded to the ballroom
'We went next to the ballroom',
I'll
proceed to the conclusion 'I'll go next to the
conclusion'). (In my experience it's hopeless to ask these people
where they got their use of
proceed
-- as, in fact, it's usually pointless to ask people where they got
ANY
usage. Both the innovation and spread of variants are largely
below the level of consciousness of ordinary speakers.)
Some contribution to the development of
proceed 'follow' probably comes
from the burden of technical terminology that attends learning
linguistics. Some of it --
reduplication,
rhotic,
morpheme,
clitic,
anarthrous
-- is obviously special to linguistics, but most of it --
onset,
liquid,
constituent,
definite,
subject -- is ordinary English
vocabulary used in very special ways, and some of it is not really
technical terminology, but "terms of art", conventions within the field
that prefer certain usages over other, equally available, ones.
Like
precede and
follow rather than
come before and
come after. (Further
complexity: in linguistics,
precede
and
follow by default mean
not merely 'come before' and 'come after' but 'come immediately before'
and 'come immediately after', This is so in ordinary language as
well, but the convention in linguistics is so strong that linguists
ordinarily have to mark the non-default case: "if followed anywhere
within the word by a voiceless consonant" and the like.)
Not only do my (mostly American) students spell
precede and
proceed 'follow' differently, they
usually pronounce them differently as well: for them, both verbs
usually have a weak accent on their first syllable, so that vowel
reduction is blocked, with the result that the verbs have something
close to tense [i] and something close to tense [o], respectively, in
their first syllables. So, for the most part, my students are not
"confusing" words at all; they're differentiating them scrupulously,
but in a way that conforms neither to the conventions of ordinary
English nor to the conventions of the guild of linguists.
I wish I could say that this was the end of it, but of course Brians
and
MWDEU wouldn't have the
entries they do if it were: there's a complex pattern of
proceed/precede "confusion" (in
pronunciation or spelling or both) that linguists can't be held
responsible for, and that I don't know the details of.
You can get some appreciation of the complexities from John Wells's
blog entry
of 23 May 2006, where he reports student misunderstandings going in
several directions at once. Note: the distinguished phonetician
Wells is British, and a professor at University College London, so his
experiences are bound to be a bit different from mine.
Every now and again my students reveal
that they are confused about the
words precede and proceed. Accounts of phonetic
processes and allophonic rules often refer to a preceding consonant,
being preceded by a vowel, and so on. In the sequence ABC, B precedes C
and is preceded by A.
But students sometimes write this as a 'proceeding' consonant, or being
'proceeded' by a vowel. Worse, since to proceed from can mean to
follow, they sometimes interpret my spoken precede, which they imagine to be proceed, as meaning 'follow', so
that they also have the meaning the wrong way round.
In theory, the distinction between the [I] of precede and the [ǝ] (weakened from
[ǝU]) of proceed
ought to be
robust. After all, in my own speech and in that of most of my students valid doesn't rhyme with salad nor rabbit with abbot; the initial syllables of finesse and phonetics differ. But in practice,
clearly it may not be: weak pre-
and pro- can get confused.
And I have just detected one of my favourite authors, Jared Diamond,
committing the reverse mistake. In his marvellous book Collapse
(Penguin 2006), on page 501 of the UK paperback edition, we read that
"LA smog generally [gets] worse as one precedes inland". Oh dear. What
a precedent.
4. Assimilation.
Assimilation is the phenomenon of
(at least partial) agreement in phonological features between two
segments. Given XY, X (as
target)
can pick up features from Y (as
trigger),
or Y (as target) can pick up features from X (as trigger). So, in
many languages, vowels pick up the feature of nasality from a following
nasal consonant (with different details in different languages).
Once again, there's a directionality. How do we describe the
facts?
The conventional terminology in linguistics takes the point of view of
the trigger: if the trigger follows the target, it's exerting its
influence
BACKWARDS onto the target. So this is
called
regressive assimilation.
And if the trigger precedes the target, it's exerting its influence
FORWARDS
onto the target. So this is called
progressive assimilation.
But suppose we look at things from the point of view of the
target. Then if the target precedes the trigger, the target is
picking up its properties from what
FOLLOWS -- which
could reasonably be called
progressive
(or forward-looking) assimilation. And if the target follows the
trigger, the target is picking up its properties from what
PRECEDES
-- which could reasonably be called
regressive
(or backward-looking) assimilation.
In my experience, students have a shitload of trouble in choosing
between the two viewpoints. A lot of them just don't get the
regressive/progressive terminology.
Long ago, I moved to using a clearer directional metaphor, borrowed
from the analysis of speech errors:
anticipation
(something changes to fit what is to come) vs.
perseveration (something changes to
fit what has gone before). Real-life examples, involving word
choice, from the 2005 NWAV meetings:
anticipation: ... with only a few
phrases [for switches] to
English for words or short phrases. [Carol Myers-Scotton]
perseveration: ... distinguishing that variation that is universal from
that universal that is not... from that variation that is not.
[Ron Horvath]
This terminology doesn't always work, but it works better than
regressive/progressive (with its
unclarity about where the point of view is located). On the other
hand,
anticipatory and
perseveratory are six syllables
each, while
regressive and
progressive clock in at only three
syllables each. So relentless devotees of Brevity should prefer
regressive/progressive. Hey,
it's a trade.
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at December 23, 2007 02:19 PM