Grammar notes

I will return to an early theme of this blog in this post: strange grammatical phenomena. Let it be known, first, that I do not speak English very well. I speak it well enough to get through the day, but I am not a great expert in the language. This is ironic, since I just applied to a CELTA course to get certified as a teacher of English as a second language. Part of the application for the course involved correcting erroneous examples. The last was “His dog’s really slender. Does he feed it enough?” I struggled to see the error here, though my guess was that the word slender is slightly misused: generally it has a positive connotation, but the context implies that the speaker intends a negative connotation (compare “skinny,” which can be positive or negative, or “scrawny,” which is normally negative). A cousin of mine suggested that the use of the contraction “’s” is in error here. I responded to her that there is a difference between erroneous and informal, especially since the example might be intended to be spoken rather than written.

Not satisfied, I looked it up in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002) by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum.¹ The relevant section is in chapter 18, § 6.2.² Using the jargon, the enclitic³ form of “is” can have a noun phrase as its host, as in “which dog’s been on the sofa?” (CGEL, ch. 18, § 6.2 [8i]). This is the situation in the example “his dog’s really slender,” where the noun phrase is “his dog.” So far so well, and I am firmly convinced that “his dog’s,” though informal in writing, is by no means incorrect. Matters did not stop there, however: I also learned from this section that the clitic forms of “is” and “has” are less restricted than others. “Am”, “are”, “have”, and “will”, for example, can only combine with a subject pronoun, as in: “I’m,” “they’re,” “we’ve,” “you’ll,” and so on. They cannot be used in other contexts: “you and they’re in this together,” for example, is decidedly forbidden, as is “Mary’ll try that.”⁴ This struck me as odd, because when I read these sentences out loud, they did not sound terribly unusual. The obvious hypothesis, that I do not speak the language well, is simple, but it does not satisfy me because it does not help me improve.

The solution, I think, is in the previous section of the same chapter of the CGEL, on weak forms (ch. 18 § 6.1). About fifty English words change their pronunciation depending on whether or not they are stressed in the sentence. Compare “some people need money” and “can you give me some money?” I pronounce the first “some” \/sʌm\/ and the second \/sṃ\/, without a vowel.⁵ The primary pronunciation of the weak form of “some” is \/səm\/, but I replace the schwa with the syllabic consonant \/ṃ\/, as is common. The same can happen with the other liquids: \/ən\/ and \/əl\/ can become \/ṇ\/ and \/ḷ\/ respectively. The appearance of a syllabic \/ḷ\/ explains why I misheard the example “Mary’ll try that”: here I am misidentifying the weak form of the auxiliary verb “will”, which can be pronounced \/ḷ\/, as the clitic “’ll”, pronounced \/l\/. But the situation is not the same, because the final \/ḷ\/ is its own syllable, whereas \/l\/ merges into the previous syllable: “we’ll” is one syllable, but “Mary’ll” is three (it does not sound like “Meryll”).

What is going on here? What I had interpreted as a clitic was in fact a weak form, and all the examples that Selkirk gives of incorrect use of clitics that nevertheless sound right to me can be clarified by analyzing the verb that I am hearing as a weak form where the vowel disappears because of my lazy pronunciation, rather than as a clitic. The problem was not that I was speaking the language incorrectly, but that I was spelling it incorrectly. The clitic forms, with the apostrophes, do not represent any occasion where the vowel goes away, but only situations where the word merges with the previous without adding a syllable. I should write “Mary will” and pronounce it \/’mɛəriḷ\/, but “we’ll” and pronounce it \/wiːl\/. If you dig through this blog, you will find many instances where I spell the weak form of “will” as “’ll”, as if it were a clitic. The same with “are” and “’re”, or “have” and “’ve”.

The moral of the story: there is a lot left to learn to conquer this language that I thought I spoke decently enough. And the best way to learn something is to teach it, because surely someone will some day ask me a question about this, or I will have to teach these niceties about orthography, and I will know the answer only because I was prodded to look it up.