{"id":119,"date":"2014-02-18T00:48:38","date_gmt":"2014-02-18T00:48:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sonny..ogi.edu\/~kgorman\/blog\/?p=119"},"modified":"2014-02-18T00:48:38","modified_gmt":"2014-02-18T00:48:38","slug":"ing-now-with-100-more-enregisterment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/ing-now-with-100-more-enregisterment\/","title":{"rendered":"(ing): now with 100% more enregisterment!"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his new novel\u00a0Bleeding Edge,\u00a0<\/em>Thomas Pynchon employs\u00a0a\u00a0curious bit of\u00a0eye dialect<\/a>\u00a0for Vyrna McElmo, one of the denizen of his bizarro pre-9\/11 NYC:<\/p>\n

All day down there. I’m still, like, vibrateen<\/span>? He’s a bundle of energy, that guy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oh? Torn? You’ll think it’s just\u00a0hippyeen<\/span>\u00a0around, but I’m not that cool with a whole shitload of money crashing into our life right now?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What’s going on with\u00a0vibrateen<\/em>\u00a0<\/i>and hippyeen<\/em>? I can’t be sure what Pynchon has in mind here\u2014who can? But I speculate the ever-observant author is transcribing a very subtle bit of dialectical variation which has managed to escape the notice of most linguists.\u00a0But first, a bit of background.<\/p>\n

In English, words ending in <ng>, like sing<\/em> or bang<\/em>,\u00a0are not usually pronounced with final [g] as the orthography might lead you to believe.\u00a0Rather, they end with a single nasal consonant, either dorsal [\u014b] or\u00a0coronal [n]. This subtle point of English pronunciation is not something most speakers are consciously aware of. But [n ~\u00a0\u014b] variation is sometimes commented on in popular discourse, albeit in\u00a0a\u00a0phonetically imprecise fashion: the coronal [n] variant is stigmatized as “g<\/em>-dropping” (once again, despite the fact that neither variant actually contains a [g]). Everyone uses both variants to some degree. But the “dropped” [n] variant can be fraught:\u00a0Peggy Noonan says it’s inauthentic<\/a>, Samuel L. Jackson says it’s a sign of mediocrity<\/a>, and merely transcribing it (as in “good mornin’<\/a><\/em>“) might even get you accused of racism<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Pynchon presumably intends his\u00a0-een<\/em>s to be pronounced [in] on analogy with\u00a0<\/em>keen<\/em> and\u00a0seen<\/em>. As it happens, [in] is a rarely-discussed variant of <ing> found in the speech of many younger Midwesterners and West Coast types, including yours truly. [1] Vyrna, of course, is a recent transplant from Silicon Valley and her dialogue contains other California features, including intensifiers\u00a0awesome<\/em> and\u00a0totally <\/em>and discourse particle\u00a0like.<\/em> And, I presume that Pynchon is attempting to transcribe high rising terminals, AKA\u00a0uptalk<\/a>\u2014another feature associated with the West Coast\u2014when he puts question marks on her declarative sentences (as in the passages above).<\/p>\n

Only a tiny fraction of everyday linguistic variation is ever subject to social evaluation, and even less comes to be associated with\u00a0groups of speakers, attitudes, or regions. As far as I know, this is the first time this variant has received any sort of popular discussion.\u00a0-een<\/em>\u00a0may be on its way to becoming a California dialect\u00a0marker\u00a0<\/em>(to use William Labov’s term [2]),\u00a0though in reality it has a much wider geographic range.<\/p>\n

Endnotes<\/span><\/p>\n

[1]\u00a0This does not exhaust the space of (ing) variant, of course.\u00a0One of the two ancestors of modern (ing) is the Old English deverbal nominalization suffix\u00a0-ing<\/em>\u00a0[i\u014bg]. In\u00a0Principles of the English Language\u00a0<\/em>(1756),\u00a0James Elphinston writes that [\u014bg] had not fully coalesced, and that the\u00a0[i\u014bg] variant was found in\u00a0careful speech or “upon solemn occasions”. Today this variant is a stereotype of\u00a0Scouse<\/a>, and with\u00a0[\u026a\u014bk], occurs in some\u00a0contact-induced lects.
\n[2] It is customary to also refer to Michael Silverstein for his notion of\u00a0indexical order<\/em>. Unfortunately, I still do not understand what Silverstein’s impenetrable prose adds to the discussion, but feel free to comment if you think you can explain it to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his new novel\u00a0Bleeding Edge,\u00a0Thomas Pynchon employs\u00a0a\u00a0curious bit of\u00a0eye dialect\u00a0for Vyrna McElmo, one of the denizen of his bizarro pre-9\/11 NYC: All day down there. I’m still, like, vibrateen? He’s a bundle of energy, that guy. Oh? Torn? You’ll think it’s just\u00a0hippyeen\u00a0around, but I’m not that cool with a whole shitload of money crashing into … Continue reading “(ing): now with 100% more enregisterment!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-phonology","category-sociolinguistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}