"Feel the bag"

In an unprecedented second post in one day, this came to me in a forwarded e-mail chain, originated by Wendy Baker of Brigham Young University.

Would-be robbers walk away empty-handed

A frustrating night for some would-be robbers in Salt Lake City, especially for one whose demand for cash went way wrong.

In Utah it may be a difficult deal to tell the difference between the words "fill" and "feel." Last night when a robber presented a bag at the Cafe Treo, he told the server to "fill" it.

"The employee thought the suspect said ‘feel' the bag, so the employee reached over and felt the bag," said Detective Jeff Bedard, spokesman for the Salt Lake City Police Department.

Bedard says the suspect replied, "You've gotta be kidding" and fled the store empty-handed. "Maybe he had a chance rethink his life of crime," Bedard said.

Talk about suspension of contrast when it really matters. There was so much disambiguating evidence in the context too! If you did a corpus search over 5 gagillon words, I guarantee that the string "This is a stick up! Feel the bag!" would be vanishingly rare.

I highly suggest listening to this audio from the story as well. The cop, who is also obviously merged, trying to make the distinction is precious.

Pronking Morphology

This video produced by The Onion is pretty interesting in a number of ways.



First off, it is an excellent example of public discourse on linguistic variation and structure. The representative's response that "maybe it's just something me and my constituents say," is spot on for a dialectal speaker's linguistic insecurity. Rep. Reynold's skepticism over the reality of "pronk" as a communal form because she had been there numerous times is also a common fallacy that even linguists fall into sometimes.

Also to be noted, "intonation," is an important member of the set of words which non-linguists have for describing language. Other important ones are "cadence," "tone," "sing-song," "nasal," "twang," "drawl," along with a great many onomatopoeic vocalizations.

What may be more interesting is everywhere the Onion writers managed to stick "pronk." It takes a number of regular derivational and inflectional morphemes, like pronking, pronked, pronkfully, and pronks (both 3rd person singular -s and plural -s).

"Pronk" also end up in these stranger, portmanteau-like constructions.

• "pronk-lem" -- problem
• "pronk-rageous" -- outrageous
• "pronk-surd" -- absurd
• "pronk-spect" -- respect

Trying to figure out what makes these well formed is a little tricky. I guess "out," "re," and maybe even "ab," and "prob" could be analyzed as separate morphemes. Still, the syllabification of "pronklem" seems a little off to me. I would have wanted to make it "pronk-blem," which is even worse. Also, the stress in "pronkspect" vs "respect" is off.

What's more, why did they decided to replace these bound pseudo-morphemes with "pronk" instead of the free pseudo-morphemes. The obvious answer is that "pronkrageous" is more recognizable as involving "outrageous" than "out-pronk-ous," which then raises the question of what constitutes the most recognizable segments of a polysyllabic word, which by all accounts is monomorphemic.

A Man and his Dialect

I've pointed out in conversation before that when a TV show or a movie is set in Philadelphia, the characters either speak in movie standard (or a watered down dialect of the actor) or they do some sort of generic East Coast accent, which is typically r-less. People go to great pains to do a Boston accent in a movie set in Boston (The Departed minus Jack Nicholson is a good example). The same for New York, granted that a lot of the actors are probably from New York originally.

The only time I can remember an attempt at a Philadelphian accent in a movie is in A History of Violence, and they didn't really get it. To be honest, this doesn't seem too bad to me. A Philadelphian accent doesn't have very much recognition generally, so why bother trying to be accurate about a detail that would really just distract and confuse an audience.

Concerning the recognition of a Philadelphian accent, I've recently realized that there is an excellent exemplar out there in the media, who is particularly loud, still very Philadelphian and maybe you've already heard him, thus making him the real topic of this post.

If you ever have trouble imagining what Philadelphians sound like, just think of Chris Matthews. Here is a video of Chris Matthews apologizing for some comments he made about Hillary Clinton. I'll give you a cursory tour of his accent, so that you'll know what to listen for. Really, there's no deep content here other than my own enthusiasm about my own dialect, but it's my blog so I won't be (any more) apologetic.

• [a]/[ɔ]: Of course, Matthews does not have the low back merger. It's very obvious throughout, so I won't give specific times to watch. The important lexical item is "on" which Matthews pronounces as [ɔn] near 00:19. This is a dead give away, since further south /ɔ/ develops a glide, like [aʊ], and further north they say [an]


• Dark [l]/ [l] Vocalization: Nearly all word final and pre-consonantal [l]'s are dark throughout the English speaking world, and in many places it is completely vocalizing. Philadelphia is has the same thing going on, but also intervocalically and in initial clusters. Matthews' l's are all very dark, and the most striking token of l-vocalization is at 02:48, where he has absolutely no [l] in Hillary, and also "television" at 01:17.
  


• [ar]->[ɔr]: This is a slightly different phenomenon. In Philadelphia, what would usually be realized as [ar] in other dialects is realized as [ɔr]. I believe it;s particularly pronounced in monosyllables, like "Hard" at 01:16 and "heart" at 01:19.


• Marry~Mary~Merry: Philadelphians pronounce these all distinctly, and while Matthews doesn't line them all up for us at any given point, "embarrassed" at 02:07 clearly has [ær].


• furry~ferry merger: Oddly enough, Philadelphians merge "ferry" and "furry", as can be heard when Matthews says "America" with [ʌr] at and "very" at 04:28
  


• aw raising: As I mentioned here, /aw/ in Philadelphia is produced more like [eɔ], as can be heard in numerous places in Matthews' speech.


• [ey] Lowering: Word finally, [ey] is lowered in a Southern kind of way, so it's more like [æy], like "day" at 00:14.


• [ay] Raising: [ay] is raised and backed before voiceless consonants, like in "night" at 00:18.


• [uw] and [ow]fronting: [uw] and [ow] are front of center for most of Matthews' words, especially "know" at 01:26 and "route" at 02:43. Fronting is blocked by a following [l] though, like in "poll" at 02:28

Another cool thing is that /æ/ is really lax in Matthews' "callous" at 04:12, where I, as a younger fellow, would have it pretty tense before that l. Anyway, it's pretty obvious that I petered out by the end there, and there could still be more for me to pull out of this. The guy's got Philly all over him, and I think that's beautiful.