Separated by a Common Language: morphology

Showing posts with label morphology. Show all posts

analogous

Aug 26, 2024

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I notice things. One thing I’ve noticed is that no one seems to be able to agree with anyone else without saying 100%. That cliché seems to have caught on in both UK and US, so that’s not the topic of this blog post. This blog post is about another thing I’ve noticed: an apparent change in the British pronunciation of analogous.

Dictionaries give the pronunciation as /əˈnaləɡəs/ (or similar; all dictionary pronunciations here from the OED). That is to say, the stress is on the second syllable and the ‘g’ is pronounced ‘hard’ as in analog(ue). What I’ve been noticing in BrE speakers is a non-dictionary pronunciation, /əˈnaləʤəs/, which is to say with a ‘soft g’ as in analogy.

To see how common this pronunciation is, I looked to YouGlish, which finds a word in YouTube videos (using the automatic transcription), classifies them by country, and presents them so that you can listen to that word pronounced by lots of people in lots of contexts. The automati{s/z}ation means that it makes mistakes. I wanted to listen to the first ten pronunciations in US and UK, but had to listen to 12 in the ‘UK’ category to get ten that were both British and the right word.

screenshot from examplesof.net

The first British one had a pronunciation that I hadn’t heard before: /əˈnaləɡjuəs/, as if the spelling were analoguous. Half (five) of the British ten had the hard ‘g’ pronunciation, four had the soft-g pronunciation I’d been hearing, as if the spelling is analogious (or analogeous). All of the first 10 US ones said /əˈnaləɡəs/.

The word analogous seems to be more common in AmE. There are 2433 examples of it on US YouGlish, versus 147 examples tagged-as-UK. (The US population is about five times larger than UK’s, and Americans might post videos to YouTube at a higher rate than Britons. So while that’s a very big numerical difference, it doesn’t mean Americans say it16 times more than the British.) That’s in speech. In writing, there’s about twice as much American analogous in the News on the Web corpus:

So, Americans have presumably heard the word more than Britons have, leading to a more uniform pronunciation.

Now, when people know a word more from reading it than from hearing it, we might expect that they will rely on the spelling to know how it sounds. What’s a bit odd here is that the non-dictionary pronunciations contradict the spelling. Perhaps some people who know the word from print have not fully noticed that the spelling is -gous and think it’s -gious. Or perhaps they’re deriving the word anew from their knowledge of other members of that word-family.

Analog(ue) = /ˈanəl*ɡ/ + -ous = analogous /əˈnaləɡəs/ [dictionary]

(* different vowels: AmE [ɔ] or [ɑ] & BrE [ɒ])

Analogy = /əˈn*lədʒi/ + -ous = analogious > /əˈnaləʤəs/ [non-dictionary]

(* different vowels: AmE [æ] & BrE [a])

Analogu(e) + /ˈanəl*ɡ/ + ous = analoguous > /əˈnaləɡjuəs/ [non-dictionary]

In the last case, the ‘u’ that is silent in analogue is treated as if it’s ‘really there’ and pronounced in the extended form. This sometimes happens with ‘silent’ final consonants and suffixes. Think of how the ‘silent n’ in damn and autumn are pronounced in damnation and autumnal. This is a bit different, since it’s a vowel, and I can’t think of another example where a silent final ue does the same thing. We don’t go from critique to critiqual (it’s critical) and tonguelet is not pronounced tun-gu-let or tung-u-let: the u remains silent.

When I tweeted (or skeeted or something) about the soft-g analogous pronunciation, some respondents supposed that the -gous ending is not found in other words, and therefore unfamiliar. (One said they could only think of humongous, which seems like a jokey word). It is true that analogous is the most common -gous word, but the OED lists 153 others, most of them fairly technical terms like homologous, tautologous, homozygous, and polyphagous. There are fewer -gious words (83), but they’re much more common words: religious, prestigious, contagious, etc. The relative frequency of -gious endings versus -gous endings may have contagiously spread to analogous.

But there’s something to notice about contagious and its -gious kin and analogous and its -gous mates. The main stress in a word like contagious is in the syllable just before the -gious, i.e. the penultimate syllable (/kənˈteɪdʒəs/, religious = /rᵻˈlɪdʒəs/, prestigious = BrE /prɛˈstɪdʒəs/ and AmE /prɛˈstidʒəs/ ). (English stress patterns are often best described by counting syllables from the back of the word.) The main stress in analogous is not on the penultimate syllable, but on the one before (the antepenult). That is, we say aNAlogous not anaLOgous, no matter how we pronounce the ‘g’. If soft-g analogous was surmised from (mis)reading rather than hearing the word, and if it was following the model of words like contagious, we’d expect it to be pronounced anaLOdʒous, with some sort of O sound as a stressed vowel. That's not what's happening.

(One way to think of this is that there’s a general pattern that long -ous words are stressed on the antepenultimate syllable, but only if we think of the ‘i’ in -gious words as a syllable of its own, which gets elided after the stress pattern has been set. There’s way more to explain about that than I can do in a blog post…and I am relying on decades-old phonology education here.)

Now, I am not a phonologist or a morphologist, so I asked my former colleague and friend Max Wheeler to check my reasoning here. He's OK'd it and adds:

To make your argument another way, while -gous is unusual, '-jous' after an unstressed vowel is unparalleled.
[...] analogy is quite a common word, while analogous is much rarer (and people may not readily connect semantically to analog(ue)). Even people with a literary education are unfamiliar with the /g/ - /j/ alternation, so 'mispronounce' fungi, pedagogy, as well as analogous, taking no guidance from the spelling. The phoneme from the more frequent word-form wins.

The moral of the story: soft-g analogous is a bit weird—which is to say, a bit interesting.

If you liked this post, you might like:

-og and -ogue

-ousness

conflab

Labels: adjectives , morphology , pronunciation | 30 comments

roast(ed)

Oct 26, 2020

I have a note above my desk that says "Next blog post: roast(ed)". It's been there for three years, since Melissa L wrote to say:

Dear Lynne,

I teach English in Germany and enjoy your blog.

I am a native speaker of American English. Most of my teaching material uses British English. I spend a lot of time thinking about and paying attention to the differences between AmE and BrE (though maybe not as much as you).

Anyway, in an exercise about dishes on the holiday table, there was roast turkey and roast potatoes.

I would say roasted potatoes.

Roasted is an adjective made out of the participial form of a verb. We make such modifiers all the time—as we say in linguistics, it's a productive morphological process. You could have a written resignation letter, a fried dumpling, a worn path. So, roasted vegetables or roasted turkey don't need much explanation: we're just using the tools that English gives us.

The question more is: what's going on with roast? Is roast beef a compound noun? It's a roast and it's beef. No, that also seems to be a past-participle of the verb, one that goes back to Middle English. These days, it seems only to be used as an adjective. People generally don't things like "I have roast a turkey" or "A turkey has been roast" these days.

So, we've ended up with two participial adjectives meaning 'having been cooked by roasting', and we have preferences for which foods we use each with. It's pretty much always roast beef in all Englishes. Roast turkey and roast chicken and roast lamb are preferred over roasted, but not as strongly as for beef. (I've kept the chart to three meats for viewability.) (Note that I've put the in the searches to make sure that the roast is not a verb.)

So it looks like roast is generally preferred over roasted with meats, but (except for beef), this looks stronger in BrE than AmE. So while roast is common with turkey and chicken in both, there are more roasteds in AmE than in BrE. (It looks like Canadian English really likes roasted turkey, but all of the examples come from a single source.)

What else can be "roast"? I asked the GloWBE corpus interface to give me the nouns after roast that differ most between US and UK. Remember: the tables below do not show the most common nouns after roast (that would be beef). They're for showing the ones that differ most. So green in the UK (right) side, means that those expressions are strongly British. The darker the green, the stronger the difference. Pink/red means NOT associated. The white ones in the table are very similar in the two.

(GloWBE doesn't seem to tag the adjective roast as an adjective, so I can only ask for the word roast, which means that some of the roasts in these numbers are the verb, as in They roast coffee for a living. Nevertheless, digging into the data shows that these roast+noun combinations mostly have roast as an adjective.)

Roast dinner stands out in the UK data. This is a meal (traditionally a Sunday roast) with some roast(ed) meat or vegetarian alternative, roast(ed) potatoes, lots of different vegetables, gravy and often a Yorkshire pudding. (I'm shocked to see that I didn't mention Yorkshire puddings in my pudding post. So there's a Wikipedia link if you need one.) A big part of the BrE roast dinner is the potatoes, which also show up strongly in the UK side of the table. I won't go further into the institution of roast dinners just because I want to get back to the adjective, but I will note that it's my husband's favo(u)rite meal despite his having been a vegetarian for 35 years. The vegetarian main might be a nut roast, but it also might be some kind of vegetable Wellington or a stuffed squash or (BrE) all sorts. The (orig. AmE) sides are at least as important as the "main" part of the meal, and roast(ed) potatoes are key. The person who takes the last roast potato is a stereotype of bad manners in these parts. People have very strong feelings about roasted potatoes. They are so well loved that they have a nickname: roasties. (Yorkshire puddings sometimes get the same treatment, so if someone says they want a roast dinner with Yorkies, they're probably not talking about eating or dining with terriers. Context matters.)

Back to roasted. Here's are the US/UK differences, where we can see the converse of the previous tables—more expressions that are strongly American.

Some of the highlighted expressions here are less about the form of roast(ed) and more about what things tend to be eaten in each place. I think it's fair to say that Americans like roasted garlic more and that Britons come across more roasted chestnuts.

My main conclusions: BrE seems to prefer roast over roasted for any meats and for potatoes. AmE isn't 100% won over by roast for things other than roast beef. The two Englishes come together for vegetables and peanuts, for which roasted does well.

Why are certain things roast rather than roasted in BrE? I wonder if it does have something to do with the roast dinner. Here's my thinking:

If we think of roast in Sunday roast as the roasted meat (after all, we do call roasted meat "a roast"), then
The roast in roast dinner probably is too. A dinner that features a roast. (Both expressions go back to early 19th century, with Sunday roast first.)
But then people start thinking of roast there as an adjective, rather than a noun modifying a noun: a dinner with the quality 'roast' rather than a dinner of a roast.
The components of the roast dinner get the modifier roast rather than roasted, because roast now indicates that kind of dinner.
Hence: roast potatoes.

To test this, I looked at carrots and parsnips, two typical roast dinner vegetables that are roasted. (Not all roast dinner (BrE) veg is roasted. For instance, there's often cabbage.) The parsnips seem to support my hypothesis. The carrots, not so much. (I did check these for stray verb-rather-than-adjective roast(ed)s. There were none.)

The moral of the story: send me an email request for a blog post, and I may eventually get to it!

Some related links/points:

On the AmE sense of roast for a ceremonial (orig. AmE) ribbing
On skim(med) milk (which trends the opposite way)
Note that BrE calls mashed potato(es) mash, but BrE speakers generally don't use mash as an adjective mash potato(es), and it's not common for AmE speakers either (in the GloWBE data). There's a different morphological difference, as indicated by my parentheses here—so click through for that link.
You find the occasional corn beef in AmE, but that's faaaaar outweighed by the corned beefs. But remember that this refers to different things in AmE & BrE!
I had intended to write about ice(d) tea in this post too, but it turned out that the numbers didn't support the idea that AmE and BrE treat this differently. Iced tea is pretty standard in both, with some products marketed as ice tea.

Labels: adjectives , food/cooking , morphology | 68 comments

loose end

Apr 26, 2020

Thomas West was responsible for last week's post topic, and here he is again, having tweeted:

Here’s another great example of BrE and AmE. Lloyd says “at a loose end” but in the US we say “at loose ends.” I wonder how differences like that happened. @lynneguist
— Thomas West (@IntermarkLS) April 18, 2020

Reading that, I first thought "I think that's a mark of my Britification—the singular is probably what I'd say now." I then wasted some time searching things I'd written (on Twitter, on this blog, on my hard drive) that used the expression, and found none. What else are lockdown Sunday mornings for?

But then I thought more and thought "But do at a loose end and at loose ends always mean the same to me?"

Loose ends, of course, need to be metaphorically tied. Both Englishes talk about, say, a project having loose ends, which need to be tied off or tied together to give us something finished—that won't unravel. Here I'm just interested in the at expression, which has more particular uses, and in which the metaphor gets a little more buried. No one says I'm at loose ends, so I'm going to tie them or I'm at a loose end, so I'm going to tie it/myself up. Maybe when you're at a loose end, you can get the image of hanging idly, or when you're at loose ends you have a sense that you have "ends" that you don't know what to do with.

The Collins Dictionary website can be useful for looking into such things as it has a whole bunch of dictionaries together: the Collins COBUILD (meant for English learners, BrE-based but more apt to cover American variants), Collins English Dictionary (which is BrE-based), and Webster's New World Dictionary (WNW; AmE-based). COBUILD presents at a loose end as a feeling of boredom, and simply states that at loose ends is the American equivalent. (Collins English Dictionary defines it as "without purpose or occupation".)

Where Collins has one definition for the singular (and by extension, the plural) phrase, WNW gives three senses for the plural phrase:

Now, all of those senses are very similar, and so this looks like a difference in lexicographical style—whether you lump similar uses together or split them into definitions that describe more specific situations where the phrase is used. The Collins "without purpose or occupation" could be mapped onto senses 2 ('without anything definite to do') and 3 ('unemployed') in WNW. It's the 'unsettled, disorganized' bit that feels a bit different from COBUILD's 'bored'. What's unclear from that definition is whether it's people or situations that are unsettled and disorganized—that is, "I am at loose ends" versus "We left the project at loose ends".

So, I had a little look in the GloWBE corpus, to see if I could find differences in how the singular phrase is used in BrE (42 unique usable examples) versus the plural phrase in AmE (20). There are few enough of these that I can look at all the examples. (The four "AmE" examples for the singular phrase were actually from British sources, so I won't consider them.)

All of the examples in both countries are talking about people, rather than situations. Some seem to be in the 'disorganized, confused' sense—and I had to wonder in some of these cases if the writer was thinking of the phrase at [someone's] wit's end. These 'confused" examples were there in small numbers in both countries, so it is looking like the expressions really are equivalent in AmE and BrE, it's just a matter of different dictionaries splitting the senses more or less.

BrE source: any advice will help as im at a loose end surely there is something i can do to sort this out???
AmE source: As a former (public school) teacher I was at loose ends how to educate my daughter (in context, this meant: didn't know which choice to make) Otherwise, most of the examples in both places signify 'having nothing particular to do' or 'idle'.

Merriam-Webster, another US dictionary, gives only one definition, which seems to combine all three of WNW's senses, and makes it clearer that this expression is used of people, rather than of their situations:

US
not knowing what to do : not having anything in particular to do

But I found two things in the data interesting:

1. As someone with both phrases in my repertoire, I felt like I'd have to use the plural with a plural subject. That is, I [singular] may be at a loose end, but my friends [plural] would be at loose ends, because they each have their own loose end. The data had five British plural at loose ends and 3 of those had plural subjects, but the BrE singular at a loose end was also used with plural subjects. This might be like collective noun agreement, in that the BrE speaker might be considering the semantic number more than the grammatical number: we are at loose ends if we're separately loose, but we are at a loose end, if we're reacting to a singular situation. That said, I don't think the data really show this in most cases. In the first example below, we get a BrE plural verb with a grammatically singular (BrE) football club name, but their loose end is singular. (Note that the collective plural in BrE isn't as semantically driven as some people—even me in the linked-to blog post—claim. I discuss that in chapter 6 of The Prodigal Tongue.)

BrE singular end, plural subject:

AC Mill Hill were at a loose end and started to play the hopeful long balls.

BrE plural ends, plural subject:

tens of thousands of men with military training are put at loose ends each year

2. AmE has a few examples of at loose ends with [one]self, which seems to have a particular sense of feeling 'lost' and 'purposeless'. BrE doesn't seem to have at a loose end with:

AmE: Years ago I had a client who always seemed to be at loose ends with himself.

None of this has addressed Thomas's question "why?" "What's the difference?" questions are answerable. "Why do they differ" questions are often not, both because the evidence is not available and because change in idioms is rarely a simple straight line. Things that change don't simply change once, they change thousands of times in small and diverse ways before they arrive somewhere else.

The thing to keep in mind here is that things had loose ends centuries before people did. People were talking about loose ends in other kinds of contexts, so if the expression as applied to people started in the singular (and it probably did), then it would be unsurprising if the plural (about things) noun phrase (loose ends) affected the singular (about people) prepositional phrase (at a loose end). When I searched for the at phrases in Google Books, there were lots of loose ends in the early 1800s, but the OED only notices the 'idle person' meaning from the 1850s onward. So, I put an am in front of the at in my searches (in order to make sure that the loose ends belonged to people) and got this (there are no British hits for am at loose ends). That seems to confirm that the plural expression came later, with the singular having some presence in AmE, then falling out in the first half of the 20th century:

But the other thing to note about origins is that the phrase was not originally at a loose end in BrE either. The at took a long time to settle down. Early examples in the OED have after a loose end and on a loose end, and the OED also notes another expression from more than 100 years earlier than at a loose end: at the loose hand.

1742 R. North & M. North Life F. North 77 He was weary of being at the loose hand as to company.

So perhaps the metaphor was originally one of idle hands rather than fraying rope? Is that why we don't talk about tying up our loose ends, because the expression didn't evolve from a nautical rope metaphor? At any rate, as idioms evolve, they often influence each other and that could have happened here.

Labels: idioms , metaphor , morphology , plurals | 19 comments

'X's Y' versus 'the Y of X'

Mar 29, 2020

[I had said I'd be blogging weekly, but that didn't happen when I had to travel for family reasons. I have got(ten) back to it, not that you'll always notice. I've decided that my goal is to *write* for the blog each week, but not necessarily to publish. So, I started writing this one last week, finished this week.]

I'm doing a lot of reading about the genitive case at the moment. Grammatical case is some kind of marking (e.g. a suffix) that shows what 'job' a noun is doing in a sentence. You might know a lot about case if you've studied German or Latin or Finnish (or some other languages), which have case suffixes on nouns. You'll know a little about case from being an English speaker who knows the differences between they, them, and theirs. Modern English marks pronouns for case, but not other nouns, except...

Old English (Anglo-Saxon) had a robust case system, which it got from the ancestor it shared with German. The case suffixes pretty much died during Middle English. (English lost a lot of other

kinds of suffixes over the centuries too, in part because suffixes are the kinds of things that get swallowed up in speech and in part becuase they're the kind of thing that become vulnerable when different languages come into contact—as happened for English and Norman French nearly 1000 years ago.) But one English case suffix, rather than disappearing, morphed into something else, and that something is the scourge of English spelling, the apostrophe-s: 's.

So in the Old-English poem Beowulf, you can read about Grendles guðcræft. That -es on the name of the monster Grendel is the forebear of 's. We can translate it as something like 'Grendel's power' or 'Grendel's warcraft'. That (masculine, singular) genitive case marker says that there's a very close relation between Grendel and the guðcræft. Grendel is the power's source or its possessor.

But when that poem gets translated into Modern English, the translators sometimes translate the -es as an 's and sometimes not:

the might of Grendel (Francis Gummere)
Grendel's power of destruction (Seamus Heaney)

That's because something else happened in Middle English: English started using of in the way that French uses de to express genitive relations—because French got all up in English's business at that point. Because of that change, of occurs only 30 times in Beowulf (where it has its original meaning of 'away from' or 'off'*), but over 900 times in Gummere's translation of it (where it means next to nothing).

So English has ended up with two ways of expressing those kinds of relations. We tend to talk about them as being 'possessive' relations and of the X in X's Y or the Y of X as 'the possessor'. But the relation is not necessarily possessive. Think about something like the theft of the bicycle and the bicycle's theft: the bicycle doesn't possess the theft. The relations between the nouns in 's/of expressions are varied and hard to pin down (but they are very close relationships, covering a lot of the same ground as the genitive in Old English).

We don't exactly use 's and of interchangeably, though, and even where we can use both we often have preferences for one or the other. One of the strongest predictors of whether it'll be 's or of is the animacy of the thing in the X position (the 'possessor'). Linguists often talk about an animacy hierarchy in which expressions that refer to animate things are preferred in certain positions in sentences over non-animate things. In terms of what's animate, humans (the teacher, Heidi) come above animals (the badger, the parrot) and collectives (the company, the union), which come above objects (the table, the book). All of the below noun phrases are "grammatical" but the higher up the list we go, the more apt people are to use the 's instead of the of phrase, all other things being equal:

the teacher's size        the size of the teacher
the badger's size         the size of the badger
the union's size           the size of the union
the table's size    the size of the table

A lot is going on in that 'all other things being equal' (a phrase used in both AmE and BrE, but AmE also likes all else being equal). Some other things that swing a possessive in favo(u)r of 's phrasing rather than of phrasing are:

heavier (more syllables/more complex syntax) possessed NPs rather than lighter ones
(the table's dirty and worn-out alumin(i)um edge vs the dirty and worn-out alumin(i)um edge of the table)
the need for denser texts, as in newspaper headlines
speech (rather than writing)
informal writing style (rather than more formal writing styles)
the dialect being spoken

So, on the last point: English in general used to be a much stronger avoidance of 's on inanimate object names. Inanimate possessors have become more and more accepted in English over the last 200 years or so. But that change has been happening faster in American English than British. This is like a lot (but not all!) of other changes in English (see The Prodigal Tongue, or if you really like to read about statistical methods, Paul Baker's book)—the change has roots deep in English's history, but goes faster/slower in different places. In this change's case (like some others), the "newer" form ('s on inanimates) is perceived as less formal and it's more condensed (and therefore quicker to say/read). Both of these properties might characteri{s/z}e some differences between the cultures that maintain the "standard" versions of English in the two countries. AmE tolerates more informality and more brevity in more situations.

So, having been thinking about all this, I did a Difference of the Day on Twitter, showing these two charts:

Here you can see that North Americans are much more happy than others to say the book's cover or the book's title or the table's edge or the table's width (or whatever other nouns might go after book's and table's). Here's the flipside, the of versions, which I didn't post on Twitter.

The table chart goes with what we'd expect to see: BrE doing a lot more with of than AmE. But the book table has AmE doing more of the book than BrE. You know why? Because American talk about books more. No, really:

So that's a lot more detail than you needed in order to see the AmE/BrE difference, but, hey, reading is good for you!

*Why does off look like of? Because they used to be the same word!

Some of the things I've been reading that influenced this post:
Carlier, Anne and Jean-Christophe Verstraete. 2013. Genitive case and genitive constructions: an introduction. In Carlier and Verstraete (eds.), The genitive. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Carlier, Anne, Michèle Goyens and Béatrice Lamiroy. 2013. De: a genitive marker in French? Its grammaticalization path from Latin to French. In Carlier and Verstraete (eds.), The genitive. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt and Lars Hinrichs. 2008. Probabilistic determinants of genitive variation in spoken and written English: A multivariate comparison across time, space, and genres. In Terttu Nevalainen, IrmaTaavitsainen, Päivi Pahta, and Minna Korhonen (eds.), The Dynamics of Linguistic Variation: Corpus Evidence on English Past and Present. Amsterdam : John Benjamins.

Labels: grammar , morphology , prepositions | 32 comments

2019 US-to-UK Word of the Year: gotten

Jan 2, 2020

For part 1 of the 2019 Words of the Year, click here. Now we're on to the US-to-UK WotY.

Radzi Chinyanganya, WotY inspiration

I had pretty much decided not to do a US-to-UK Word of the Year for 2019. The words nominated were generally ones that had made a big splash in English recently on both sides of the Atlantic, rather than long-standing Americanisms that were making a splash in Britain. I had begun to think that BrE had reached peak Americanism. But then I went through my top tweets of the year, and saw one that made me think: "Oh yeah, that's it."

The US-to-UK Word of the Year is:

gotten

Here's the tweet that reminded me:

I'll admit getting teary over @iamradzi's departure from Blue Peter, but the reason (for a linguist) to watch his 'best of' episode is the number of times he says 'gotten'. It really is making a comeback in UK. If we can resurrect a verb paradigm, imagine what else we can do 😉
— Lynne Murphy (@lynneguist) April 30, 2019

Now, this choice might be controversial in that gotten is not just and not originally American. It is one of those linguistic things that mostly died in the UK while it thrived in the US. When I moved to the UK, a colleague told me that you'd still hear gotten among old people in Yorkshire. I haven't had the chance to bother any old people in Yorkshire about that, but -en forms of get were found far and wide in English dialects. That said, the OED has it as "chiefly U.S." and it is widely perceived in the UK as an Americanism. In England you do hear it more from Americans (in the media, if not in person) than from British folk. Here's a bit of what I said about it in The Prodigal Tongue:

That part of the book goes on to examine the evidence that gotten only really got going in the US—that it was not used much in the formal English of those who came from England to the Americas, and that its use exploded only in the late 19th century, when the US was finding a voice of its own. (Want to know more? I have a book to sell you!)

So, while gotten is not just American nor originally American, America is where gotten made its fortune. The "standard" British participle for get is have got, as discussed (along with its meaning) in this old post.

What's interesting about gotten in Britain in 2019 is that it's been used quite a bit in places where you don't tend to hear non-standard, regional grammatical forms: like on the BBC and in Parliament. And I have heard it among my child's middle-class (orig. AmE) tween friends here in the southeast. Here are some interesting examples, besides our friend Radzi.*

On the CBeebies (BBC channel for young children) website:

In a BBC news story about an orange seagull in Buckinghamshire:

Hospital staff said the bird "had somehow gotten himself covered in curry or turmeric".

In the linguistically (and otherwise) conservative Telegraph newspaper:**

Yet, it is the ageing filter that has gotten most people talking.

By then-Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry, who got into trouble for saying:

The Lib Dems have gotten kind of Taliban, haven’t they?

And in the House of Commons:

"I would like to share some of the thoughts of organisations that have gotten in touch in recent days to share their experience of training mental health first aiders..." —Luciana Berger, 17 Jan 2019
"...those in Sinn Féin say, 'Well, we’ve gotten away with two years of saying we’re not going back into government until...'" —Gregory Campbell, 5 Mar 2019
"...the mess that this place has gotten itself into..." —Deirdre Brock 19 Mar 2019
"...the best way of dealing with this is not through a voluntary levy based on the least that can be gotten away with" —Jim Shannon, 2 July 2019

There's a difference, though, between the ones from the House of Commons and the others. The parliamentary ones have gotten in a set phrase of some sort. It's long been the case that British speakers say gotten in close proximity to mess and into, since they're alluding to Laurel and Hardy films, where gotten is indeed the form. And in the other cases above, we've got gotten away with and gotten in touch, which are figurative and idiomatic uses. (Neither of those particular idioms is particularly American.) Since gotten is heard in Parliament as part of set phrases, it's not clear that it would be a 'normal' way for those speakers to form the past participle of get in general.

The other examples above (and indeed Radzi's uses that inspired my original tweet) are have gotten just as a plain old verb in its many meanings. Those interest me more because they do seem more like the re-introduction of the get-got-gotten paradigm, and not just certain constructions that have been remembered with a certain verb form.

A lot of the British gotten that I've been exposed to is from homegrown children's television and children, and that's what really seals it for me as a 2019 word. After 20 years of not hearing it much (and training myself out of saying it much), I'm really noticing it. You can find lots of people, particularly older people, in the UK talking about its ugliness or wrongness, but the fact that younger people are un-self-consciously saying it makes me think that it will get bigger still.

And on that note, a bit later than is decent, I say goodbye to 2019!

Footnotes:

* I haven't presented corpus numbers in this post, since the bulk of the gotten numbers in corpora tend to be (in news) quoted Americans or (in other things) in set phrases. The Hansard corpus tool at Huddersfield University doesn't seem to be able to separate the gottens from the ill-gottens—which is a form that has remained in BrE despite the more general loss of gotten.

** (I got quite a few google hits for gotten in the Telegraph, for which I could see the gotten in the preview. But for some, when I clicked through, the same sentence had got. Might this be because some stories were originally posted with gotten then changed when the "error" was caught?)

Labels: morphology , WotY | 21 comments

-ousness

Mar 25, 2017

We've been having some problems with people starting to (jocular Linguist English) peeve about unrelated topics in the comments section. This has upset some readers (and also me, but I'm hardened by 11 years of blogging). More importantly it is against the comments policy, so I've had to resume being a police-y person about it. If you'd like to request a topic for the blog, please feel free to email me (see contact page). If you'd like to just let off opinion-steam, there are lots of places on the web for that. Here, we're trying to get away from the opinions and into the facts.

So, in the interest of the comments policy, I've just deleted a comment on a previous post. Having already checked out whether the assumptions in the comment were fact or fiction, I might as well make it into a blog post. I know that this is a bad idea. I don't want to set up the precedent that topic-changing comments will get immediate blog-treatment. But, it's Saturday morning and my resistance is low.

So, Rob commented on the last blog post:

It's My first time on this blog and as an amateur aficionado of grammar, I love what you've done to the place. I just wanted to share my biggest AmE-BrE bugbear:

My teeth are set a-grinding when I hear the words "tenaciousness", "ferociousness" or any word where there is an "ousness" added, largely by North Americans (to include Canada to a certain extent). I find myself shouting at the screen when I heard it for the first time.

It's not even that "ferociousness" gives a deeper description of the property. You can BE ferocious but should you exhibit ferociousness or display ferocity? I know which one I would rather hear. The same for tenacity. It suggests a certain rawness (I know. Ironic, right?) that "tenaciousness" just detracts from, yet I know the "ousness" phenomenon is grammatically legal. It just sounds lazy to me.

At the risk of inciting a blaze - what does everyone else think?

First, thanks for the compliment, Rob, and I hope we'll see more of you around here. But now I'm a-gonna get grumpy. What people think about language doesn't tell us much about language. It does tell us a lot about identity (and the role of language in forging it) and about cognitive biases in thinking about language and people. This is the theme of the book I'm sending off to the publishers at the end of April (which is not planned for publication till 2018, so [orig. AmE] don't hold your breath!).

As Rob notes, -ness is a productive suffix in English. which means it's legal to put with adjectives, even those Latin/French-derived ones that might be associated with other suffixed noun forms. Plenty of -ous adjectives are mainly nominalized (made into nouns) with -ness -- for example, consciousness, callousness, and righteousness (though that one isn't French/Latin in origin, just French-affected). Then there's suspiciousness--which generally means something different from the related noun suspicion. Those nouns are normal in British and American English, so there's nothing bad about ousness in itself.

In other cases, as Rob notes, there are other, usually French/Latin-derived, nouns that don't use -ness and that often are quite (BrE) different in form to the -ous adjective. But contrary to Rob's presumption, adding -ness to these things does not seem to be a particularly American activity. In the GloWBE corpus, we find similar rates in BrE and AmE for anxiousness (rather than anxiety) and pretentiousness (rather than pretension), for instance.

So what about Rob's examples of tenaciousness and ferociousness? For each of these, GloWBE has a statistically insignificant difference between the two national dialects--5 and 7 in AmE, 6 and 8 in BrE, respectively (raw numbers, from a collection of about 450 million words from each of those countries). These--in both countries--are outnumbered at least 100-fold by their counterparts tenacity and ferocity. In the News on the Web (NoW) corpus, there are 0.4 ferociousnesses per million words (pmw) in AmE, 0.3 in BrE (but .15 in Pakistan, by far the most). For tenaciousness it's 0.2 in AmE and 0.1 in BrE. (Sri Lanka "wins" with 0.4.)

Image from here

What's a bit interesting is that all of the related words (tenacious, tenacity, tenacously, ferocious, etc.) are found (sometimes significantly) more in the British data than the American. For example in NoW, ferocity occurs 1.05 pmw in AmE and 1.71 in BrE, and ferocious 2.29 in AmE and 4.62 in BrE. Americans use the words a fair amount, but Brits use them much more. Lower numbers set up a situation where using a more transparent morphological (i.e. suffixation) process is more likely to happen. (We see that even more strongly in newer Englishes as in Pakistan and Sri Lanka.) But the UK/US differences in occurrence in ferocity and tenacity are very small, if they're there at all.

The -ity forms sound more "learnéd" because they are generally learn{ed/t} through exposure, rather than derived (orig. BrE slang) on the fly. People like those -ity nouns because they are a sign of a big vocabulary. But they're also a bit of a (BrE) faff. That is to say, they come at a cognitive cost. You have to keep them in your mental dictionary and understand that they are related to the adjective forms even though they have different vowels (compare the a and o in tenacious/tenacity, ferocious/ferocity). The -ness forms can be derived at the spur of the moment. Anyone has access to them. They are, I'd say, a bit more democratic.
The low, low numbers for the -ousness versions of these nouns mean that you'll hear the -ity versions more in any accent. The similar numbers of -ousness versions probably mean that if you regularly hear one accent more, you're more likely to have heard the -ousness form in that accent. But when we hear something unusual in an accent that isn't ours (and especially in a variety of English that's regularly accused of [AmE] messing with English), we notice it more. There's a lot of confirmation bias going on in people's (orig. AmE) peeves or bugbears about other people's language.

On a final note (oh, I can't believe I've spent the hour I was supposed to spend on something else this morning!), I was surprised to learn that US and UK use precocity at similar rates and much more than precociousness. I always feel like I'm using a joke-word [like the AmE ridiculosity] when I say it.

(P.S. for Rob: I haven't preserved the link to your Google page from the original comment--but if you want to be identified, let me know and I'll stick a link in.)

Labels: adjectives , morphology | 78 comments

try and, try to; GMEU app

Dec 14, 2016

Our university's website provides helpful information for students about research and writing. It says things like this:

Another big mistake is to try and write an essay at the last minute.

I look at that and itch to edit it, just like early in my time in England, when my department head sent round a draft document for our comments, and I "helpfully" changed all the try and's to try to's. Imposing your American prescriptions on a learned British linguist is probably not the best idea, and it's one of those little embarrassments that comes back to haunt me in the middle of the sleepless night. I had had no idea that try and is not the no-no in BrE that it is in edited AmE.

I'm reminded of this for two reasons:

Marisa Brook and Sali Tagliamonte have a paper in the August issue of American Speech that looks at try and and try to in British and Canadian English (and I've just learned a lot about the history of these collocations from it)
I've been using this new English usage app and testing it on matters of US/UK disagreement. (Review below.)

The weirdness

Try and is weird. I say that as fact, not judg(e)ment. You can't "want and write an essay" or "attempt and write an essay". The try and variation seems to be a holdover from an earlier meaning of try, which meant 'test' or 'examine', still heard in the idiom to try one's patience. Though the 'test' meaning dropped out, the and construction hung on and transferred to the 'attempt' meaning of 'try'.

Though some people insist that try and means something different from try to, those claims don't stand up to systematic investigation. A 1983 study of British novels by Åge Lind (cited in Brook and Tagliamonte) could find no semantic difference, and a statistical study by Gries and Stefanowitsch concluded "where semantic differences have been proposed, they are very tenuous". The verbs be and do seem to resist try and and prefer try to.

There are some cases where try and doesn't mean the same thing as try to, where the second verb is a comment on the success (or lack of success) of the trying:

We try and fail to write our essays. ≠ We try to fail to write our essays.

But in most cases, they're equivalent:

Try and help the stranded dolphin. = Try to help the stranded dolphin.

Try and make it up to them. = Try to make it up to them.

(If the rightmost example sounds odd, make sure you're pronouncing it naturally with the to reduced to 'tuh'. If the leftmost one just sounds bad to you, you may well be North American.)

Though there are other verbs that can be followed by and+verb, they don't act the same way as try and. For one thing, try and seems to stay in that 'base' form without suffixes. It's harder to find examples in the present or past tense (see tables below).

? The student tries and writes an essay.
? The student tried and wrote an essay.

Compare the much more natural past tense of go and:

The student just went and wrote a whole essay.

So, try and is a bit on-its-own. Be sure to/be sure and is the only other thing that seems to have the same grammatical and semantic patterns.

The Britishness

Here's what Hommerberg and Tottie (2007) found for British Spoken and Written data and for American Spoken and Written.

In the forms that can't have suffixes (infinitive and imperative), BrE speakers say try and a lot more than try to. They write try and less, but in in the infinitive, it's still used about 1/3 of the time.

Brook and Tagliamonte found that BrE speakers under 45 use try and over try to at a rate of about 85%, regardless of education level. But for older Brits, there's a difference, with the more educated mostly using try to.

AmE speakers sometimes say try and, but they say try to more. They hardly ever use try and (where it could be replaced by try to) in writing.

Brook and Tagliamonte find much the same difference for British English versus Canadian English.

The "non-standard"ness

Though the try and form goes back before American and British English split up, its greater use in Britain is the innovation here. The try and form only started to dominate in Britain in the late 19th century.

Brook and Tagliamonte note that it's "curious" that BrE prefers try and when it has "two ostensible disadvantages":

it's less syntactically versatile, since it doesn't like suffixation,
it's long been considered the "non-standard" form, repeatedly criticized in even British style guides.

On the second point, Eric Partridge's Usage and Abusage (1947) calls it "incorrect" and "an astonishingly frequent error". However, other British style guides are much more forgiving of it. While the third edition of Fowler's Modern Usage (1996) says that "Arguments continue to rage about the validity of try and", it notes that the original 1926 edition said that "try and is an idiom that should not be discountenanced" when it sounds natural. The Complete Plain Words (1986) lists it in a checklist of phrases to be used with care ("Try to is to be preferred in serious writing"), but it got no mention in Ernest Gowers' original Plain Words (1948) or the recent revision of the work by Rebecca Gowers (2014). Oliver Kamm's rebelliously "non-pedantic" guide (2015) calls try and "Standard English". Other British sources I've checked have nothing to say about it. Though it's only recently climbed the social ladder, British writers and "authorities" seem, on the whole, (BrE) not very fussed about it.

American guides do comment on try and. Ambrose Bierce (1909) called it "colloquial slovenliness of speech" and Jan Freeman (2009) calls it "one of the favorite topics of American peevologists". The dictionaries and stylebooks that are less excited about it at least pause to note that it is informal, colloquial, or a "casualism". The American Heritage Dictionary notes:

To be sure, the usage is associated with informal style and strikes an inappropriately conversational note in formal writing. In our 2005 survey, just 55 percent of the Usage Panel accepted the construction in the sentence Why don't you try and see if you can work the problem out for yourselves?

(I can't help but read that to be sure in an Irish accent, which means I've been around Englishpeople too long.)

One hypothesis is that try and came to be preferred in Britain due to horror aequi: the avoidance of repetition. So, instead of Try to get to know, you can drop a to and have Try and get to know. The colloquialism may have been more and more tolerated because the alternative was aesthetically unpleasing.

Try and is an example I'm discussing (in much less detail) in the book I'm writing because it seems to illustrate a tendency for British English to make judg(e)ments "by ear" where American English often likes to go "by the book". (Please feel free to debate this point or give me more examples in the comments!)

Garner's Modern English Usage

And so, on to the app. The Garner's Modern English Usage (GMEU) app is the full content of the 4th edition of the book of the same name, with some extra app-y features. I've tested it on an Apple iPod, but I think it's available for other platforms too. On iTunes, it lists at US$24.99.

Full disclosure: Bryan Garner gave me a free copy of this app in its testing stage. I've met Garner in person once, when I'm quite sure he decided I was a hopeless liberal. (The thing about liberals, though, is you can't really be one without lots of hope.) He's a good one to follow on Twitter.

Sad disclosure: I received the offer of the free app not too long after I ordered a hard copy of the 4th edition, which (AmE) set me back £32.99, and, at 1055 pages, takes up a pretty big chunk of valuable by-the-desk bookshelf (AmE) real estate. I bought that book AFTER FORGETTING that just weeks before, hoping to avoid the real-estate incursion, I'd bought the e-book edition for a (orig. AmE) hefty $34.99. So, although I got the app for free, I expect to get my money's worth!!

So far, the app works beautifully, and is so much easier to search than a physical book. Mainly, I've used it for searching for items with AmE/BrE differences. I also used it to argue back to a Reviewer 2 who was trying to (not and!) (orig. AmE) micromanage aspects of my usage that don't seem to have any prescriptions against them (their absence in GMEU was welcome). (Reviewer 2 did like our research, so almost all is forgiven.)

GMEU didn't have everything I looked up (see the post on lewd), but that's probably because those things are not known usage issues. I had just wondered if they might be. But where I looked up things that differed in BrE and AmE, the differences were always clearly stated. Here is a screenshot of try and:

Garner's book is so big because it's got lots of real examples and useful numbers, as you can see in this example. Nice features of the app, besides easy searchability, include the ability to save entries as 'favorites', tricky quizzes (which tell me I qualify as a "true snoot"), and all the front matter of the book: prefaces, linguistic glossary, pronunciation guide, and Garner's essays about the language.

The search feature gives only hits for essay topics and entry headwords. That is probably all anyone else needs. I'd like to be able to search, for instance, for all instances of British and BrE to find what he covers. But I guess that's what I can use my ebook for...

Over the course of his editions and his work more generally, Garner has included more and more about British English, but at its heart, GMEU is an American piece of work. Other Englishes don't really (BrE) get a look-in (fact, not criticism). I very much recommend the app for American writers, students, and editors, but also for British editors, who are often called upon to work on American writers' work or to make British work more transatlantically neutral.

Labels: CanE , grammar , morphology , prescriptivism , verbs | 67 comments

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Separated by a Common Language

Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK