Orthocorrection
orthocorrection
Over on ADS-L we've been talking about some examples where a speaker
starts into a standard construction and then "corrects" it by shifting
to the nonstandard variant that seems more natural.
The first example was supplied by Wilson Gray on 3/16/05:
Spoken by a black TV-show guest:
He aks me _whose, uh, who_ car was this.
Note the nonstandard
aks.
Then the speaker starts the standard possessive
whose car, but restarts and
downshifts to the nonstandard
who car
(without the overt marker
's),
and then continues with the nonstandard (in subordinate clauses)
inverted word order
was this.
I then posted a somewhat similar example, from an interviewee on NPR's
Morning Edition, 3/8/05 (talking
about mercury vapor):
...it will break up into so small a... so small of a
bead that...
People with
of in this degree
construction tend to judge the
of-less
variant as fancy, bookish, old-fashioned, pretentious, etc.
(Please don't write to tell me that the
of variant is just incorrect and
I'm corrupting the young by even mentioning such things. My
students at Stanford mostly view my
of-less
variant as having a whiff of the 19th century. I stick to it, but
I'm clearly riding the wave of the past.) So this guy found
himself embarking on the (to him) stylistically inappropriate
construction, and fixed things.
So, what do we call this phenomenon? It's clearly not
hypercorrection, since the move is
AWAY from a more
standard variant. Nor is it really what John Baugh has called
"hypocorrection", though the move is towards a less standard
variant. But in Baugh's hypocorrection, as in classic
hypercorrection, the form that actually gets produced overshoots the
target in some way -- someone trying to drop into AAVE, say, and coming
out with
I yo' man, omitting
a copula where AAVE speakers just wouldn't. There's no overshoot
here; people end up right at the level they're aiming for.
Whimsically, this might be called "Baby Bear correction"
("ursacorrection" for short): not too much towards one end of the
scale, not too much towards the other, but instead just right.
"Orthocorrection" is a less whimsical possibility, and it keeps up the
tradition of using Greek-derived prefixes with the Latin-derived base
correct(
ion).
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at March 19, 2005 08:15 PM