Hypercorrection
From Free net encyclopedia
Hypercorrection is (1) elaborate, prescriptively based correction of common language usage, often introduced in an attempt to avoid vulgarity or informality, that results in wording commonly considered clumsier than the usual, colloquial usage (for example, in English, adherence to the proscription against split infinitives or the ending of a clause with a preposition); or (2) usage that many informed users of a language consider incorrect but that the speaker or writer uses through misunderstanding of prescriptive rules, often combined with a desire not to come across as informal or uneducated.
Contents |
In English
Unlike some languages, such as French and German, English has no single supreme authoritative body that governs whether any given usage will fall into the category correct or incorrect. Nonetheless, within certain groups of users of English, some of which are quite large, certain usages are indeed considered either (1) unduly elaborate adherence to formal rules instead of rules of popular, widespread, or common usage or (2) mis- or ill-informed changing of correct, but seemingly informal, usage into wording that is incorrect but seemingly formal.
Preposition at the end of a clause
An anecdote often attributed to Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the Second World War, has Churchill replying to a hypercorrective memo with the phrase "this is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put".[1] This is an example of hypercorrection used as parody: Churchill went beyond creating a grammatically correct sentence to mock the elaborate refusal to end a clause in a preposition (or insistence on placing the preposition before the relative pronoun); he treated two adverbs, up and with, as prepositions. The two words actually modify put, and their placement before the verb is extremely unusual.
Personal pronouns
Jack Lynch, assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, describes another example of hypercorrection:
- We're taught as children, and beginning language learners are told, you don't say 'me and you went to the movies.' It should be 'you and I.' And a lot of people, therefore, internalize the rule that 'you and I' is somehow more proper, and they end up using it in places where they shouldn't — such as 'he gave it to you and I' when it should be 'he gave it to you and me'.[2]
Another form of pronoun hypercorrection seems to originate in the speaker's or writer's desire to appear educated or refined rather than in understanding of the usual usage of pronouns. It is the use of reflexive pronouns in places properly occupied by other pronouns. The reflexive pronouns in English are myself, yourself, thyself, himself, herself, itself, oneself, ourselves, yourselves, and themselves. Reflexive pronouns are properly used when the direct or indirect object of the verb is the same noun as the subject: for example, in "She dresses herself", the same person is designated by she in the subject and by herself in the object. Hypercorrection includes (1) all non-appositive uses of the reflexive pronoun as subject and (2) all non-appositive uses of the reflexive pronoun as object when the object is not the same person or thing as the subject. For example,
- "Pat and myself went shopping" should be "Pat and I went shopping". The person designated by myself is in the subject, and so is properly designated by I.
- "Sam wants to give yourself a gift" should be "Sam wants to give you a gift". The person designated by yourself is not the same person as the one designated by Sam, and so is properly designated by you.
- "Joe likes myself and Alex" should be "Joe likes me and Alex" (or Alex and me). The person designated by myself is not the same person as the one designated by Joe, and so is properly designated by me.
(Appositive use of reflexive pronouns is not hypercorrection: e.g., "I, myself, went shopping", "Sam gave you, yourself, a gift", "Joe heard me, myself, in the kitchen", and "The students, themselves, are intelligent".)
Phonemes
Hypercorrection also occurs when a colloquial dialect differs in pronunciation from the standard. For example, because standard American English is a rhotic dialect (requiring the pronunciation of syllable-final -r), speakers of regional non-rhotic dialects often overcompensate for the loss of syllable-final -r by pronouncing some words ending in vowels as if there actually were an extra -r at the end (for example, pronouncing idea as "idear").
Similarly, individuals who generally pronounce both t and d with an [ɾ] may, in an attempt to overformalize, pronounce lady as laty.
Another example of phonetic hypercorrection occurs when speakers from the North of England move south, and pronounce sugar as if it were spelled "shugger", to assonate with the Received Pronunciation butter. Perhaps the most notorious example is the pronunciation of the name of the letter H as [heɪtʃ] in an effort to avoid the perceived vulgarism of "dropping Hs".
Plurals
Another area of hypercorrection involves Greek- and Latin-looking words like octopus; the spurious plural octopi likens the octopus to Latin nouns of the Second Declension that form plurals in -i. (Were there actually a classical plural of octopus, it would be octopodes.) Words such as platypus, status, hiatus, rebus, opus, census, ignoramus (which, in Latin, is a form of a verb), omnibus and mandamus are sometimes inflected the same way, although some much more commonly than others; none of these examples' sources would be inflected in that way in Latin or Greek. Virus sometimes gets the pseudoclassical plural form virii, which presumes Latin *virius. An even less sensible plural is penii (for the plural of penis, penes in Latin), which is not uncommon in Internet speak. Occasionally one sees the form rhinoceri, though the correct Latin or Greek plural of rhinoceros would be rhinocerotes.
All of these words take the regular English inflection in -es, but a few of the hypercorrected forms have passed into such common usage as to be considered acceptable by some, despite their origins.
Yet more hypercorrection deals with the pronunciation of the -es plural forms of certain English nouns. Although the most common way of pluralizing a noun in English is to add -s or -es to the end of the singular form, there are many exceptions. One such exception involves some words whose singular forms end in -is and the plurals of which are formed simply by the replacement of -is with -es: e.g., crisis and crises, neurosis and neuroses, prosthesis and prostheses, testis and testes, diagnosis and diagnoses. The standard pronunciation of such plurals has the final syllable equivalent to the sound of the English word ease [iːz]. Yet, some speakers use the same ease [iːz] pronunciation for the -es endings of nouns whose plurals are formed in the ordinary way, by the addition of -es: e.g., processes (plural of process) and biases (plural of bias). The correct pronunciations of words such as processes and biases have the final syllable equivalent to that of houses and witches: [əz].
Room for confusion exists in some homographic plurals, where the final "-es" pronunciation depends on the word's meaning. For example, axes is pronounced [æksiːz] as the plural of axis, but [æksəz] as the plural of axe. The pronunciation of bases similarly depends on whether its singular is basis or base. Hypercorrective replacement of [əz] with [iːz] in plurals may result partly from confusion over these homographs.
Hyperforeignism
When pronunciation of learned words goes astray, it is sometimes called a hyperforeignism. For example, one might conclude that, as the -s is silent in Mardi Gras, coup de grâce is pronounced [ku deɪ grɑ]; it is actually [ku də gras]. Most native speakers of English pronounce the word lingerie [lɑnʒɜreɪ]; the French pronunciation is closer to [lĨʒəʁi]. Similarly many, perhaps most, English speakers pronounce "machismo" as "makizmo" on the analogy of other foreign-derived words, such as "masochism", though in Spanish "ch" is pronounced in the same way as in English. Another example is an English-speaker's pronouncing Beijing with a French 'j' Template:IPA, even though the Mandarin Chinese sound represented by the j in Pinyin is closer to the English j Template:IPA. Similar hyperforeignism is in the pronunciation of the j in the name of the Taj Mahal, often rendered Template:IPA but more properly pronounced Template:IPA (as it is in most other Roman-alphabet spellings of words associated with languages of India). Another example is the pronunciation of Punjab as "Poonjab", through ignorance of Anglo-Indian spelling convention, in which the neutral vowel in Hindi is represented by the letter "u" on the analogy of the English "cup".
Another kind of hypercorrection arises when people try to use diacritics from foreign languages, often adding them spuriously. For example, one often sees *habañero peppers, which should be habanero, as a consequence of a misapplied analogy with jalapeño. One may also see, in certain cafés, the spelling of the Italian word "grande" as grandé. This may be done, however, to make it more likely that monolingual customers pronounce the word at least semi-correctly, as "GRAAN-day" as opposed to just plain "grand."
Unintentional misuse of diacritics should not, however, be confused with intentional misuse, or use without concern for traditional function, as in the heavy-metal umlaut.
In other languages
West South Slavic languages
The syllables je and ije appear in Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin speech where Serbian has only variation in quality (length of the vowel) of e. Not every Serbian e becomes je or ije in the other West Balkan countries. Serbs who try to disguise their rearing often fail miserably, either undersupplying or oversupplying jes and ijes.
Chinese languages
Modern Cantonese is currently undergoing a phonological shift, one of the changes being the dropping of the initial ng- (IPA: Template:IPA) consonant to a null initial. For instance, the word ngaa4 (牙, meaning "tooth"), ends up being pronounced aa4 (Note: Cantonese romanization provided using Jyutping). Prescriptivists tend to consider these changes as substandard and denounce them for being "lazy sounds" (懶音).
However, in a case of hypercorrection, some speakers have started pronouncing words that should have a null initial using an initial ng-, even though according to historical Chinese phonology, only words with Yang tones (which correspond to tones 4, 5, and 6 in Cantonese) had voiced initials (which includes ng-). Words with Yin tones (1, 2, and 3) historically should have unvoiced or null initials. Because of this hypercorrection, words such as the word oi3 (愛, meaning "love"), which has a Yin tone, are pronounced by speakers with an ng- initial, ngoi3.
German
In German, the dialect spoken in the city of Düsseldorf and its surroundings heavily features 'ch' [ç] sounds where a High German accent calls for 'sch' [ʃ] sounds. Speakers with this accent would say 'Fich' [fɪç] instead of 'Fisch' [fɪʃ] (fish), and 'Tich' [tɪç] instead of 'Tisch' [tɪʃ] (table). This is due to a hypercorrection of the Rhineland accent prevalent in that area of Germany, an accent that replaces many 'ch' [ç] sounds with 'sch' [ʃ] sounds, making for a colourful accent often considered simple or vulgar by speakers of High German. Attempting to avoid this error, speakers of the Düsseldorf accent hypercorrect it to an abundance of 'ch' [ç].
Hebrew and Yiddish
Careful Hebrew speakers are taught to avoid the colloquial pronunciation of "bediyyuq" (exactly) as Template:IPA. Many speakers accordingly pronounce "lihyot" (to be) as if it were spelled "lehiyyot" (Template:IPA), though there is no grammatical justification for doing so.
Hypercorrection can work in both directions. It is well known that the vowel qamatz, which in the accepted Sephardic pronunciation is rendered as Template:IPA, becomes Template:IPA in Ashkenazi Hebrew. Many older British Jews therefore consider it more colloquial and "down-home" to say "Shobbes" and "motza", though the vowel in these words is in fact a patach, which is rendered as Template:IPA in both Sephardi and Ashkenazi Hebrew.cs:Hyperkorektnost es:Ultracorrección he:תיקון יתר nl:Hypercorrectie no:Hyperkorreksjon sv:Hyperkorrektion wa:Forcoridjaedje