All 50 Uses of
linguist
in
Do You Speak American?
- Linguists would challenge Prince Charles on two grounds: First, the concept of "words that shouldn't be" is alien to the freedom inherent in English.†
Chpt Intr. *
- To help us translate their work, many of America's leading linguists have lent their skills to our project.†
Chpt Intr.
- At the end of this book is a list of all the linguists we have consulted, with their affiliations.†
Chpt Intr.
- Linguists draw their own maps to mark different dialect areas.†
Chpt Intr.
- Aside from a person's physical appearance, the first thing someone will be judged by is how he or she talks," says linguist Dennis Baron.†
Chpt 1
- We know that now because linguists have been able to record their speech, and largely because broadcasting, especially today's television "talk shows" and "talk radio," have flooded the ether with the speech of ordinary people.†
Chpt 1
- In one of his commentaries on NPR's Fresh Air, Stanford University linguist Geoffrey Nunberg said, "What's different now is that conversation isn't a private affair anymore—it has become the chief vehicle of entertainment and public information.†
Chpt 1
- John McWhorter, a linguist at Stanford, entitled his latest book Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care.†
Chpt 1
- He went on to blame the media, political correctness, and descriptivist linguists, whom he called "a curse on their race, who of course think that what the people say is the law.†
Chpt 1
- Sheidlower is the young Brooklyn-born American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and a descriptivist linguist.†
Chpt 1
- He maintains that people like John Simon are actually complaining that linguists and dictionary writers are no longer focused exclusively on the language of top people: "When linguistic conservatives look at the way things were in the old days and say, 'Well, everything used to be very proper, and now we have all these bad words and people are being careless and so forth,' in fact people always used to be that way," Sheidlower says.†
Chpt 1
- The freedom and inventiveness of American usage reminds some linguists of how the English language was in Shakespeare's day.†
Chpt 1
- The more relaxed American attitude was naturally reflected on Madison Avenue, with verbal informalities such as Winston tastes good like a cigarette should becoming so much a part of the culture that linguists now doubt that many Americans today would notice the grammatical lapse.†
Chpt 1
- Perversely perhaps, the current younger generation tends toward a "subversive prestige" or "covert prestige," as linguists put it, in adopting the speech of less privileged minorities; for instance, wiggers are privileged white teenagers who wish to sound and dress like blacks.†
Chpt 1
- To linguists that is a myth.†
Chpt 2
- In the 1980s, a few elderly people still spoke Gullah, a dialect linguists trace back to the African slave trade.†
Chpt 2
- But, like lobsters in Maine, crabs are getting scarce, the island is losing population, and there is increasing contact with the outside world— all a common recipe for dialect dissipation, as the linguists call it.†
Chpt 2
- Linguists regard this as a hoary myth, because the "old-time" words or expressions offered as evidence do not add up to what is claimed.†
Chpt 2
- The linguist told the producer he was barking up the wrong tree, but he wouldn't take no for an answer.†
Chpt 2
- Linguist Guy Bailey said that, before World War II, regional varieties of American English differed in folk vocabularies: "I'll give you an example.†
Chpt 2
- More recently, linguists began marking dialect areas not by different vocabulary but by how differently words were pronounced.†
Chpt 2
- Linguists are impressed by how stable the traditional boundaries remain, between North, Midland, and South dialect regions, even with all the modern movement of people.†
Chpt 2
- So it is on pronunciation that linguists have focused their search for change and its causes.†
Chpt 2
- This change is so extraordinary that it merits another example, provided by one of Labov's colleagues, linguist Sharon Ash: the vowel sound in tock shifts to tack, tack to tech, tech to tuck, tuck to talk, and talk back to tock.†
Chpt 2
- Labov believes this vowel change is "terribly" important: "From our point of view as linguists we want to understand why people should become more different from each other.†
Chpt 2
- Labov's theory has been elaborated in the research of Stanford University linguist Penelope Eckert, who studied language changes originating among high-school students in a predominantly white suburb of Detroit.†
Chpt 2
- Linguist Dennis Preston says, "It's completely ungrammat-ical to me, and yet I grew up around Louisville, only a few miles south of the area where that's perfectly grammatical.†
Chpt 2
- The linguists we interviewed believe that the media can be useful in spreading vocabulary and causing innovations to be picked up and spread faster.†
Chpt 2
- In fact, many Americans can be amusingly unaware of their own accents: linguists have collected many stories of people with strong local accents, in places like Texas and coastal North Carolina, who thought they talked like Walter Cronkite!†
Chpt 2
- John Baugh, a Stanford linguist, believes that mainstream media dialect is well understood by speakers of American English from almost every background, but that media influence on actual speech patterns is not great, because those speech patterns are really shaped locally.†
Chpt 2
- Toward a Standard: Putting the "R" in "American" In the rest of the English-speaking world, probably the most characteristic sound in American English is the fully sounded "r," known to linguists as the postvocalic /r/, the "r" following vowels.†
Chpt 3
- The more fashionable or upmarket the store, the more the salespeople pronounced the "r"s in their replies, and the linguists assumed that the speech of the staffs resembled or mimicked that of their customers.†
Chpt 3
- Linguist Walt Wolfram sees a lessening of the colonial linguistic mentality.†
Chpt 3
- When the issue is viewed another way, as with the effort to find an accent without regional identifiers, most linguists see a bottom-line standard in written American English as the absence of certain grammatical constructions, or "nonstandard" forms such as ain't, double negatives, and subject-verb disagreement.†
Chpt 3
- We hold strong opinions about accents different from our own, and linguist Dennis Preston, of Michigan State University, has made those opinions his special study.†
Chpt 3
- It avoids what linguists call the intrusive "r," pronouncing saw as sawr or, as John Kennedy did, Cuba as Cuber.†
Chpt 3
- Linguist Dennis Baron, who heads the English Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says that, like it or not, people are always going to stereotype people by their speech.†
Chpt 3
- Linguist John Fought says that if you went to Atlanta, for example, and tried to set up a practice that involves face-to-face interactions with people, you'd be at a disadvantage if you didn't have the right regional usage: "There's a standard, a social expectation that is defined for each group of people, in computer science or brain surgery."†
Chpt 3
- Since rules are not fixed and continually evolve, with spoken usages creeping into written language, some linguists question whether the written standards can guarantee universal understanding, and tend to dismiss the efforts of hotline grammarians for delivering too reassuring a notion of correctness.†
Chpt 3
- Linguist John Fought says that the consequences of not paying attention to your English teacher in America are much less than they might be in other countries, because the culture at large has a more relaxed attitude about these tilings.†
Chpt 3
- "Well, that's a relief," said Fought, expressing the view of many professional linguists that holding the line on such rules as those against split infinitives, or insisting on || is I instead of the widely used It's me, is futile.†
Chpt 3
- Geoffrey Nunberg, the Stanford linguist, said in one of his NPR commentaries that people writing software programs for computer spell-checkers "seem to pander more and more to all the infantile schoolroom prejudices that people have about usage."†
Chpt 3
- But linguist John Fought says there is a "flattening of the hierarchy" even in publishing, a lot less layering of proofreading and copy editing and fact-checking, because the process is too expensive.†
Chpt 3
- But with modern bridges and roads the two sounds have migrated back and forth across the river, in what linguists call a bleedover effect, and the two dialects merge a little.†
Chpt 4
- Linguist Walt Wolfram, an expert on dialects, was traveling with us.†
Chpt 4
- Linguist Dennis Preston says it used to be that, outside the South, "if you liked country music you were hopeless."†
Chpt 4
- Linguist Crawford Feagin made a detailed study of accent change— and the disappearance of "r"-less speech—in her hometown, Anniston, Alabama, a small city in the foothills of the Appalachians.†
Chpt 4
- Dennis Preston, the linguist who sampled Northern reactions on the train from Philadelphia, notes that a lot of historical things have happened, including the election of recent presidents from the South.†
Chpt 4
- That tendency for newcomers to pick up features of Texas speech has been noted by Guy Bailey, provost of the University of Texas at San Antonio, and his wife, Jan Tillery, also a linguist, who have studied recent changes in Texas dialects.†
Chpt 4
- Linguist: Barbara Johnstone, whom we met in Pittsburgh, studied the language of ten prominent Texas women, one of them Molly Ivins.†
Chpt 4
Definition:
-
(linguist) a specialist in the study of language
or:
a person who is skilled in multiple languages