Innovative Usage Thread

[Zaarin]

Might as well get this thread going again.

My mom does not vocalize her /l/; in fact, in general I'd say her /l/ is probably brighter than mine (my [ɫ] is distinctly pharyngealized, I think). However, she does exhibit strong /l/-vocalization in one and only one specific phrase that I have heard: alpha male [ˈæɫfə ˈmɛɪ̯ɔʊ̯] (note that her /ow/ is also more back and more round than my [əʊ̯]). I've wondered if this might be dissimilatory between the two /l/ phonemes, but again I've never heard her /l/-vocalize in any other context, even with nearby /l/'s.

[missals]

I'm going to share a piece of data I overheard a while ago and have been (strictly metaphorically) shouting from the rooftops ever since.

As a preface, last semester, a professor of mine talked about how there's been a longstanding and ongoing trend in English where verbs that end in /t/ or /d/ are reanalyzed as part of the class of verbs that do not take the suffix -ed in the past tense, and which thus have identical forms in each cell of the English verb paradigm (hit/hit/hit), excepting those that have vowel changes (sit/sat/sat) or take -en in the participle form (eat/ate/eaten).

An example of this is "pet" - pet/petted/petted is still standard, but pet/pet/pet is quite common these days as well. ("I already pet the dog.") Sled/sled/sled is another recent one that's been gaining ground in North America - "I sled down the hill and crashed into a tree."

Anyways, only a couple weeks after that discussion, I was sitting in my room when I overheard my roommate's friend say the following:

"He nut in me twice, and..."

He'd analogized the verb "nut" to fit the pattern! Just like "shut"! And since it's in the third person, I knew it was the past tense, since it would be "He nuts in me twice" if it was the narrative present tense. And I know it wasn't just an underarticulated or elided -ed, since I clearly heard him articulate the final /t/ of "nut" as a glottal stop.

And with the verb "nut" in the sense of "ejaculate" being a fairly new zero-derivation (as far as I know), it goes to show that this analogical tendency is still active in modern-day English!

[Kuchigakatai]

I've been told that in Spain some people have trouble with the /gɾ/ cluster, especially in griego and grieta, which then come out as [giˈɾje.ɣo] and [giˈɾje.ta]. I wonder if those same people pronounce grueso as [guˈɾwe.so]?

[Dē Graut Bʉr]

[ˈgiɾje.ɣo] and [ˈgiɾje.ta]

I do hope the placement of those stress marks is a typo.

[Raholeun]

"He nut in me twice, and..."

Stay classy, zbb...

[missals]

Stay classy, zbb...

Hey, I don't choose which conversations to overhear. (The walls of this apartment are paper-thin!) And besides, I'm not going to turn away a great example of analogy in action just because it's X-rated.

[Kuchigakatai]

I do hope the placement of those stress marks is a typo.

Thank you, I have now corrected my previous post.

[Travis B.]

Was, were, and would are frequently reduced to [ɘːs]~[ɘːz]*, [ʁ̩(ː)], and [ʊːt]~[ʊːd]* respectively in the dialect here.

* voiceless final consonants by default, but voiced if followed in the next word by a vowel or semivowel

[dɮ the phoneme]

I have the pin-pen merger, except in the environment t_. So pen and pin are both [pɪn], him and hem are both [hɪm], but ten [tɛn] is distinct from tin [tɪn], and Thames [tɛmz] from Tim's [tɪmz], etc.

[Zaarin]

I have the pin-pen merger, except in the environment t_. So pen and pin are both [pɪn], him and hem are both [hɪm], but ten [tɛn] is distinct from tin [tɪn], and Thames [tɛmz] from Tim's [tɪmz], etc.

That's interesting, because I'm not PIN-PEN merged, but I do have [ɪ æ] > [ɛ] in certain specific words. So and/end are both [ɛnd], since/sense are both [sɛn(t)s], and for me milk is [mɛɫk]. However, pin/pen, tin/ten, him/hem, Sindh/send, etc. remain distinct.

[Travis B.]

Then there are things such as the merger of than and then as /ðɛn/ in much of NAE and how here Illinois is pronounced with a /ɛ/ as do some people pronounce milk, like you and my mother, and vanilla.

[Linguoboy]

Then there are things such as the merger of than and then as /ðɛn/ in much of NAE

Technically not a merger since etymologically they are the same word and, IIRC, lexicalisation of the two variant forms only takes place with the standardisation of the language in the 1700s. It would probably be more accurate to call than a historical spelling pronunciation which became widespread elsewhere while NAE preserves an earlier state of affairs.

[dɮ the phoneme]

The other day, upon seeing a particularly large avocado, my friend said to me "wow, look how big-ass this avocado is." That usage of the -ass intensifier felt very wrong to me, and though I'm not quite sure how to analyze the how ___ this ___ is construction syntactically, I think it's because the adjective big-ass is functioning predicatively there, which is definitely not something you can do in my idiolect.

[Vijay]

It might help to think of big-ass as just another way of saying huge.

[Linguoboy]

It might help to think of big-ass as just another way of saying huge.

But his point is that it isn't for all people.

IMD, "Look what a big-ass avocado this is!" sounds more commonplace. It allows predicative use of adjectives intensified with -ass, but that is still marked as innovative in a way that attributive use isn't.

[Travis B.]

I agree with Linguoboy - in my dialect the predicative use of big-ass is more marked than the attributive use of the same, even though it is not ungrammatical either.

[Curlyjimsam]

I'm going to share a piece of data I overheard a while ago and have been (strictly metaphorically) shouting from the rooftops ever since.

[...]

And with the verb "nut" in the sense of "ejaculate" being a fairly new zero-derivation (as far as I know), it goes to show that this analogical tendency is still active in modern-day English!

When I was at school the past tense of then-new verb "to text" varied between "text" and "texted", with the first possibly the more frequent.

[dɮ the phoneme]

I don't know enough about American English dialects to know whether this is genuinely an innovation, or something already somewhat established which I'm just not familiar with, but I have a friend who evidently has ɪ > i /_ŋ and then ŋ > n, so he has the contrast sin [sɪn] vs sing [sin], where I have sin [sɪn] vs sing [sɪŋ].

[linguistcat]

I don't know enough about American English dialects to know whether this is genuinely an innovation, or something already somewhat established which I'm just not familiar with, but I have a friend who evidently has ɪ > i /_ŋ and then ŋ > n, so he has the contrast sin [sɪn] vs sing [sin], where I have sin [sɪn] vs sing [sɪŋ].

I'm not sure if I've ever pronounced the i in <sing> as /ɪ/ but I also keep /ŋ/ as far as I know, tho ŋ > n is a pretty common change so I could imagine that could be a pretty set pronunciation in some dialects.

[Linguoboy]

Today I heard "YouTube" as a count noun meaning "video available on YouTube". (E.g. "There's a YouTube you can watch.")