RE: Corpora: Apostrophes

From: Lou Burnard (lou.burnard@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Dec 19 2001 - 16:19:09 MET

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    In France a few years ago there was a passing fad for collecting little
    lapel badges, which were usually referred to as "pin's". I have always
    understood this to indicate that the word should be pronounced in an
    "english" manner, e.g. as "peenz", rather than with a nasal vowel as the
    spelling "pins" would otherwise require, thus distinguishing the word
    from that used to describe pine trees.

    But what it also suggests is that (in this context at least) the "'s"
    suffix is seen at least by anglophone French speakers as a useful piece of
    orthographic flummery which can be deployed for arbitrary non-syntactic
    purposes. It's an orthographic variation available for whatever purpose
    you please, like all those accents and diacritics that 17th century
    grammarians peppered the French language with.

    It's a distinction, in short, in search of a difference. What I find
    interesting is why it should be features of this kind that prescriptivists
    and others anxious to tie down the tail of language seize on. Why should
    we care so much about distinguishing "it's" and "its" but not give a toss
    about distinguishing any number of other homophones? Why don't we have
    separate spellings for "that" as a relative and "that" as an article, even
    though they are clearly distinguished in the speech of most English
    speakers?

    Might the answer be that this is actually quite an easy distinction to
    teach, but that it requires prior acquisition of some basic linguistic
    concepts (case, number) not generally available? So it becomes a useful
    way of both expressing and reinforcing the concerns of an elite.

    With which untenable proposition, I wish all readers of the corpora list a
    pleasant holiday!

    Lou



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