I've been amazed at the loss of the derivational suffix -ly that routinely
marks adverbs.

Bill's talking about inflectional suffixes, I know, but I couldn't help
mentioning the loss of -ly.

I'm not one to cling to language bits that are rusting out and disappearing,
but it really took me by surprise that -ly is not a productive part of the
language for many speakers.

If you focus on it and really listen to current language usage on television
(both scripted and unscripted), in radio, and with the people you encounter,
you'll notice it too.

John Alexander

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 5:41 PM, Spruiell, William C <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

>
>
> I’ve read a ton of student papers over the past two weeks, and based on
> this batch and those from the last couple of years, I’m starting to get the
> impression that a greater percentage of my students every year are dropping
> inflectional suffixes (plurals, tense-markers) and finding it difficult to
> notice the omissions when proofreading (I haven’t been formally counting, so
> I could be mistaking something I’ve just noticed for a trend, though).  I’ve
> always seen some of this in examples where the suffix isn’t audible in
> normal speech, particularly  if the suffix is well on the way to being a
> kind of fossil in the particular expression(e.g. “ice tea” – you can’t hear
> the realization of the {-ed} suffix before [t], and “iced” in that
> expression is probably a unitary adjective rather than a participle for most
> speakers who do use the –ed in writing). That’s absolutely normal, and over
> time the suffix-less form can become the norm (“ice cream” used to be “iced
> cream”).
>
>
>
> What I’m seeing, though, are forms like “I was read this book” or “These
> short story are….”; they’re in papers written by native English-speakers who
> don’t speak any of the dialects that would normally drop those suffixes, and
> the same students do use the suffixes in speech (it’s exactly the reverse of
> the usual situation, in which students don’t know they have to write bits
> that they don’t say). If I draw attention to a line in which there’s a
> missing –ing, etc., the students frequently **can’t** see anything unusual
> about it; their usual reaction is to look at it for a minute, then get rid
> of a comma (if there is one) or add one (if there isn’t).  It’s that
> inability to notice the “gap” that I’m particularly intrigued by. If I read
> the section out loud, they immediately notice the omission (and I then tell
> them that they need to coerce friends into reading papers out loud for them
> as a coping strategy). It’s not a language issue at all; it’s just an
> orthographic one.
>
>
>
> I know similar effects can be associated with mild forms of dyslexia, but I
> find it hard to believe that fully 15 - 25% of the student population is
> even mildly dyslexic.   I realize this is starting to sound like a variant
> of “Geezer Rant #325A; Those Darn Kids Won’t Write Right” but I’m curious
> about whether anyone else is noticing similar patterns, or whether this has
> been common all along and I’ve somehow managed not to notice it (which,
> given the rest of this post, would be rather amusing for everyone but me…).
>
>
>
> ---- Bill Spruiell
>
> Dept. of English
>
> Central Michigan University
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