John,
People who don’t make an “X vs. X-ly”
distinction in writing also don’t, as you point out, make it in speech
either. That’s more what I think of as an effect of normal language
change; people are writing what they actually say, whether or not a usage guide
would approve of it. The students who are dropping the –ing suffixes do
say it. It’s almost as if they’re classing it with expression such
as “umm…” or the “like” that’s, like, used
to, like, mark, like, hesitation.
Bill Spruiell
From: Assembly for the
Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John
Dews-Alexander
Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2009 6:58 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Suffix-dropping
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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