A new agentive morpheme?
00hfs...@leo.bsuvc.bsu.edu
in the last year on either sci.lang or alt.usage.english, so here goes:
In the formal, and sometimes casual, speech of professional educators, local
news anchors, and local government politicians (and no, I'm not trying to find
some odd set union--these are the people I've observed doing this), a new human
agentive morpheme is showing up, namely, the morpheme -or (in ASCII IPA), in
contrast with the instrumental suffix -R. Words like
administrator
educator
editor
facilitator
evaluator
advisor
actor
supervisor
regularly show up in these speakers with /-or/, rather than /-R/. I don't
think that -R is suffixal because the words are pronounced with compound
stress, a secondary stress on -or, and in those whose stems end with /t/, the
/t/ is aspirated.
It may be that this is merely a spelling pronunciation and a sort of
professional affectation. In fact, I suspect that that's how it started out,
but I think it has become a separate morpheme from -R. The reasons for this
judgment are
1. other words that end in orthographic "-or," where those letters do not
represent a separate morpheme, are not pronounced /-or/, e.g.,
rotor
minor
favor
motor
however, the word "anchor" used in the phrase "news anchor" does get the /-or/
pronunciation, as if the orthographic "-or" has been reanalyzed as a suffix;
2. instrumental -R is not pronounced /-or/, e.g.,
loud-speaker
ruler
cultivator
3. some agentives spelled -er get pronounced /-or/, although these are rather
more unusual, e.g.,
employer
writer
reviewer
Have others observed this phenomenon as more than simply an affectation? Does
it have additional properties, beyond those that I've described? Has it been
observed beyond the populations I've described?
Herb Stahlke
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University Computing Services 00hfs...@virgo.bsuvc.bsu.edu
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Rob Malouf
...
>Have others observed this phenomenon as more than simply an affectation? Does
>it have additional properties, beyond those that I've described? Has it been
>observed beyond the populations I've described?
As I recall, in welding jargon a "welder" is a machine for welding and
a "weldor" is one who welds.
Rob Malouf
mal...@csli.stanford.edu
James Myers
>>Have others observed this phenomenon as more than simply an affectation? Does
>>it have additional properties, beyond those that I've described? Has it been
>>observed beyond the populations I've described?
>
>As I recall, in welding jargon a "welder" is a machine for welding and
>a "weldor" is one who welds.
>
>Rob Malouf
>mal...@csli.stanford.edu
Dwight Bolinger published a paper in _Language_ some time in the 1940's called
"Visual Morphemes". He gives numerous examples of differences in spelling in
English words that do not correspond with differences in pronunciation yet
still seem to signal a difference in meaning. One example he gives is the
distinction between "-er" and "-or". If this morphemic difference is now
becoming pronounced as well, even when it is not reflected in the spelling,
that would be very interesting indeed.
-- james myers
jmy...@ubvms.cc.arizona.edu
Joe Widows
The word computor is a man, while computer is a thing.
I know that this dicotomy appeared in the 1940's or earlier.
I can recall hearing this construction and use
all my life on the prairies of Hill County, Texas,
as long ago as 1960 when I would have first become aware of it.
English seems to be rapidly changing in use, but I have seen little
notice of it taken anywhere.
Joe Widows: Linguist in the Dark.
DISCLAIMER: BNR builds telephones, not opinions.
ANTIDISCLAIMER: The wrong stuff is mine, (the right stuff, too)
widows: Linguist in the Dark.
Simon Trew
#
#As I recall, in welding jargon a "welder" is a machine for welding and
#a "weldor" is one who welds.
#
#Rob Malouf
#mal...@csli.stanford.edu
This is certainly not the case in Britain, where "welder" will do both.
I shall refrain from finishing with an awful pun.
Rich Alderson
>In article <1993Jul29....@yc.estec.esa.nl> ka...@yc8.yc.estec.esa.nl
>(Karen Hutchins) writes:
>>For us poor plebs who just try to use English, is there an FAQ for all the technical terms above, not to mention the conventions for net phonetics?
>
>As the maintainer of the sci.lang FAQ, I'd be willing to add a short
>glossary to it, if people think that'd be useful. Does anyone want to suggest
>what words to define? E-mail would be best for this: mark...@spss.com.
The problem will be with the theoretical basis of the various definitions.
This will be easy enough for various syntactic theories, I should think, since
they mostly seem not to reuse most older terminology, but as we have proven
here on sci.lang, good old terms such as "phoneme" and "morpheme" are suffi-
cient to call for pistols at dawn and the like...
Umm, no :-> here.
--
Rich Alderson You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
what not.
--J. R. R. Tolkien,
alde...@cisco.com _The Notion Club Papers_