Joanna,
That's interesting research and probably worth writing up for publication. I should think American Speech or one of the sociolinguistics journals would be interested. I touched briefly on resumptives and island constraints a long time ago in a paper I did in Language on relative "that" titled "Which that". 1976, I think. There is tolerance for them when otherwise there would be an island contraint violation, but I didn't collect survey data on it. What was interesting was that resumptives arise crosslinguistically about when pronoun deletion starts to fail on the Keenan-Comrie Accessibility Hierarchy.
There has also been research in composition surveying teachers on the seriousness of writing errors and then examining their performance on an exercise where they were to identify the errors in text. Some of the results were close to random. I think some of that has appeared in CCC, but I don't remember when.
Herb
Herb writes,
"The interesting question in this discussion, one that really hasn't
been dealt with, is why some innovations bother us and other don't.
"Hone in on", for example, while a much more recent innovation, is much
more widely accepted. Good writers and speakers use it and my students
are almost unanimously surprised when I explain what's going on with it.
"Hopefully" as a sentence adverb still drives some to distraction
while most people have accepted it. But "fun" as an adjective,
especially an inflected adjective, bothers a lot of people. I'm curious
whether there's any consistency to which ones have a harder time being
accepted. I assume that a major factor is social, who uses the
innovative form, but is there more than social conditioning?"
What a fascinating question! It would be interesting to inquire among
sociolinguists and see whether anyone has investigated this question.
Some research my students and I did gives evidence of the social factor.
We did a Hairston-style survey, asking people across a broad range of
occupations (but all middle-class) which of various usages were
problematic and to what extent they objected to those that they found
erroneous. There was a large difference in responses to "errors" typical
of middle-class speech (changes underway in Standard English) vs.
"errors" due to dialect differences in grammar. In the first instance,
less than 50% of the respondants (-ents?) even noticed that there was a
usage that would be considered an error (e.g., a misuse of 'whom'). The
disapproval rating for those errors that were noticed was low--about
30%, if I recall correctly. However, nearly all respondents noticed the
dialect differences, and the disapproval rate was around 85%.
I'd suspect, though, that linguistic structure might have something to
do with it. For instance, my guess would be that differing usages of
inflectional suffixes, like tense or comparison, on frequent words like
"fun" would be objected to more strongly, because of the frequency and
regularity of this type of structure. Phrasal expressions, on the other
hand, like "hone in on", are less frequent and aren't as transparently
governed by grammatical rules. In such cases, people really need to be
aware that the usage is an innovation and not just something they don't
hear very often. If they are hearing it from someone they consider a
peer, rather than of a lower class or an errant youth, they are less
likely to object (as our survey showed).
There are other very interesting questions. I used to collect sentences
with relative clauses in which a resumptive (excess) pronoun appears,
usually because the preceding material is so far away that the person
forgets that they don't need the pronoun. For instance:
"Then there was that big fight that we had when we went camping up in
the Sierras last summer that I don't even remember what it [excess
pronoun] was about."
This is a made-up example, but if you listen, you will hear these all
the time. I recorded examples I'd heard people say. Later I asked them
if they would ever say such a sentence, and read their own sentence to
them (which they had forgotten uttering by then). They would invariably
reject the sentence. Chomskyans would call these performance errors
which people have time to reject when they are reflecting on them. But
many languages require the resumptive pronoun.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Johanna Rubba Associate Professor, Linguistics
English Department, California Polytechnic State University
One Grand Avenue • San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. (805)-756-2184 • Fax: (805)-756-6374 • Dept. Phone. 756-2596
• E-mail: [log in to unmask] • Home page:
http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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