Back Formation

While reading some previous information from class, I came across back-formation in the Harley text. When I saw the word a few weeks ago, I pretty much overlooked it and kept on reading. When I saw it again this week, it struck me as crazy-odd. I read it, and the explanation of it and thought, well okay obviously I do not have the mental strength to understand Harley so, I took to Google. I did hold out the slightest of hopes that there was a "back-formation for dummies," sadly that has not been written, yet. I went to about 25 sites and read the various explanations and definitions and thought, okay I need a nap - this is about as clear as mud! I have the meaning, or the description of what back-formation is and even some examples but, really and I mean REALLY what is it?! If there isn't a George Micheal (class TA) following me around telling me which word is a back-formation and which words are front-formation (totally not a thing but, definitely think it works in this sentence) then HOW is a girl to know?! The meaning I had to go on was the following: Back-formation is when a new word (or more exactly a form of a word) is created from an existing word usually by deleting something on the beginning or end of the word. Usually, the thing that is deleted looks like a affix (-er, un, etc.), and so this "affix" is removed, and we step "back" toward a "root" form of the word...though that root may not have actually existed historically. Not a back-formation, but an example of suffixes and roots, just for a reminder: un-lock-able. un- is a prefix, lock is the root, and -able is a suffix. Prefixes and suffixes are both types of affixes. So, for an example of back-formation, take the verb edit. Edit, in fact, did not exist years ago. There were editors, but no one was described as editing something. The -or/-er suffixes commonly denote noun forms of verbs in English (writer, worker, inquisitor, etc.), so it was quite easy to strip away the -or from editor and be left with the new verb form edit. Other examples of this: babysitting -> babysit resurrection -> resurrect burglary -> burgle televise -> television Yeah, so not very clear, in relation to my complaint which is this: We have the word babysitting, and it allows for the back-formation of babysit. How do we KNOW that? How do we know that babysitting was a word prior to babysitting being a word? Would we have to check the OED to see the first date of usage to discover which came first? I think in my brain somewhere it makes sense but, I can't explain it without wondering myself...which came FIRST the chicken or the egg?! I went to the smartest person I know personally, in the study of language at least, and one who quite possibly has the best beard of any TA at the U of A (said TA shall remain nameless as I did not get his permission to quote him or his smarticles on my blog). I posed the question above to him and he gave N-grams a new purpose in my life. The long and short of it is that while cruising the chip aisle at Walmart, and shamelessly watching a woman threaten to make her kid go to bed at 2pm for a week over a bag of Cheetos, I will most likely NOT have to decide if any of her warnings are words created by back-formation. As super fly, bearded guy put it: "You're over thinking it girl slow down!" This is a linguistics term, used in the linguistic (etymology) world considering I am only vacationing here, and not planning to move in; I'm really okay with just knowing what it means. So, if there are others out there losing sleep over back-formation and therapy/medication has not eased your suffering, know that there is help: N-gram! Put in your two words babysitting & babysit and track usage, below it shows that babysitting was in "use" and babysit does not show up until 1947.

Howdy Y'all!

Grammatical Idiosyncrasies

I am from the south - the "Dirty South" as people like to call it; meaning way past the metropolis of Atlanta, past the Malls and stately mansions, in the backwoods. Our town is so small we finally got our first red-light when I was 16, the nearest grocery store is 45 minutes away, and the only gas station in town has been there "since God was a boy," and Bo owns it. Bo has had three wives; number 1 was Lisa; he tattooed her name horizontally across his forearm. When they divorced he tattooed an "X" over the L, I, A and utilized the S to form his 2nd wife's name, Stella, vertically. When he married wife number 3, he kept up with tradition, tattooed an "X" over S, T, E, L, L, and used the A to form Amy, horizontally. I swear you can't make these things up!

While doing research for my paper this week I came across various kinds/types of idiosyncrasies, which I passed and kept hunting how the heck to do a phonological, syntactical, and semantic entry for -er (perhaps I'll go into the stroke worthy search in a different post). This afternoon while on the phone with my brother he said: "I got me a new car today alls I had to do was air up em' tires."

Let's pause here - I have eight brothers and sisters, yes my family is redneck, mainly because they think household furniture is acceptable both in and outdoors. It's perfectly normal to have at least two cars that are being "worked on" in the driveway and anywhere between 2-5 dogs running amuck through the yard (dogs do NOT live inside in the dirty south). However, my family is also the most amazing group of siblings in the world, some have gone to college, some have not, some are married and have kids, some do not. They love my mother with a fierceness that unless you're from the south, you will never understand. They love God; they love America, and the love John Deer! However, grammar may have slipped through the cracks here and there with some of "us." Okay, back to my story.

I was not startled or even alarmed when he said this; we just kept right on rolling with the conversation. After I got off the phone and as I was relaying the conversation to my husband, and  I made my best "Red" impression (side-note - we call one brother Red, that's not his name, we have just always called him that) and my husband cracked up! It was then that I noticed exactly what he said, which caused me to do some research.

What the heck is up with the Southern Dialect?

**This is only about"my" Southern peeps and in no way is a reflection of how all southern individuals speak**

Southerners often replace adverbs with their adjective counterparts: such as saying "That works real good "rather than saying "That works really well."

Often use "her" or "me" rather than "herself" or "myself": such as "I got me a new car" rather than saying "I got myself a new car."

Using a noun in the place of a verb or adjective: such as "I need to air up my tires" rather than saying "I need to put air in my tires."

Dropping the final vowel on a word while keeping the meaning the same: such as "I think ever-body should vote" rather than saying "I think everybody should vote" **Should be notated that things may be Bigger in Texas but, everything is plural in the south! We don't really do "everyone" or "someone" it's "ever-body, which is articulated like "err-bodi" all the time, in all situations.

More times than I should admit, Southerners will put a /t/ onto the end of a word, in the place of the -ed suffix; such as "I grabt me a sandwich at lunch" or "I showert this morning." rather than saying grabbed or showered.

Occasionally Southerner's take the order in which letters are arranged in a word, as a suggestion and NOT as a rule: such as "Can I aks you a question?" Which is probably the worse mispronunciation of any word ever and has got to be like nails on a chalkboard to a real linguist (which I most definitely am not!)

I could go on with the amazing language we Southerners have just made up, including words like cooter-brown, dagnabit, youins, shant, goldarnit, and on, and on but, I think you get the picture; we talk funny!

There has been much discussion and debate over just how and why the Southern Dialect is the way it is. It was changed, formed, influenced, created, and broken by the English who settled it, by the African Americans who were forced to work it. By the southerners who were cut off from the prosperity and growth in the North (mostly by their own doing) from the Application Trail down, the long-time practice of using children as free labor rather than educating them and this list could go on and on. I don't have an answer as to why some Southerner's speak the way they do, and why some don't. I grew up in the south, I went to the same schools my brothers attended. I was in my 20's the first time I traveled more than 100 miles away from home but, I would like to think I have my use of grammar, pronunciation and articulation under control. Perhaps there aren't just idiosyncrasies within the Southern dialect; maybe the answer is that in some "areas" the whole of the English language has transformed into a Southern language which is it's own separate entity, hiding under the umbrella of American English. Or maybe we just need better schools?? What do you think?

Tongue Tied

Monolingual?  Bilingual?

           I read an article titled Bilingual People Have Improved Attention Control at nerosciencenews.com about researchers from the University of Birmingham that found "an enhanced ability to maintain attention and focus" in individuals that are bilingual (Zhou, 2016). Reading this article was a painful reminder of why all of my staff calls me pequeño jefe. 
All of my employees at work are 100% bilingual, while I am 100% monolingual. Of course, they have taught me the things not to say in public and some slang that will most likely get me kneecapped in certain company but, that only makes me foul and possibly in danger, not bilingual. In one of my psychology courses, we learned that bilinguals have an advantage over monolingual individuals. 
Bilinguals, who are completely fluent in both languages, “consistently outperform their monolingual counterparts on tasks involving executive control” (Bialystok, 2011). A bilingual for the purpose of this blog entry means a person who speaks two languages fluently and speaks both of them regularly. A monolingual is a person that speaks only one language. Executive control is a domain general ability, which is used by various cognitive processes, which shows up in the frontal lobe, and are higher level cognition control such as attention and working memory. 
Current research has shown that bilingual individuals can have an advantage over monolinguals in various areas. De Groot (2011) found that bilingual children perform better on cognitive tasks than monolingual children. It has also been found that bilinguals perform better on the Stroop Test, "a task that requires people to emphasize an items color and ignore it's meaning" in a study conducted by Bialystok (2009) (pg. 358). One most notable advantage of being bilingual is that " bilingual adults who have dementia typically develop signs of dementia later than monolingual adults with dementia (Bialystok, 2009; Bialystok et al., 2007)" (pg. 359). The belief is that bilinguals have two full vocabularies at the ready and when using one, they are constantly having to suppress the other one, therefore their executive control is greater. Miyake et al. (2000) found that the executive control system has three core components which are inhibition, updating, and shifting. When a bilingual is speaking one language, they are having to use these attention orientated abilities consistently to use and decided not to use one language or another.
There are some slight disadvantages to being bilingual such as possibly having a smaller vocabulary (Bialystok, 2009; Bialystok et al., 2010). Bilinguals may process language slower than monolinguals, and they may alter how they pronounce some speech sounds in both languages (Gollan et al., 2005).
Upon relaying this information to my staff they agreed, that yes, they were all smarter than me. Thus they began to call me pequeño jefe. In hindsight, this may have been information better left at school. :(

References:

  Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I. M., Green, D. W., & Gollan, T. H. (2009). Bilingual minds. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 10, 89 –129. doi:10.1177/1529100610387084

Bialystok, E., Luk, G., Peets, K. F., & Yang, S. (2011). Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13, 525–531. doi:10.1017/S1366728909990423

Bialystok, E. (2010). Global-local and trail-making tasks by monolingual and bilingual children: Beyond inhibition. Developmental Psychology, 46, 93–105. doi:10.1037/a0015466

De Groot, A.M.B. (2011). Language and Cognition in bilinguals and multilinguals: An Introductions. New York: Psychology Press.

Emmorey, K., Borinstein, H. B., Thompson, R., & Gollan, T. H. (2008a). Bimodal bilingualism. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11, 43–61.doi:10.1017/ S1366728907003203

Miyake, A. and Shah, P. (2000), Models of working memory: Mechanisms of active maintenance and executive control (pp. 442–481). New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. 

        Zhou, Beinan and Krott, Andrea. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. doi:10.1017/S1366728916000869. neurosciencenews.com/bilingual-attention-control-5007/ (accessed September 10, 2016).