Raising stylistic awareness through linguistic trivia

Włodzimierz Sobkowiak, IFA UAM

Postcards, advertising leaflets and billboards, xerox-, SMS- and internet-lore can be ample sources of linguistic trivia of all kinds, including those where some aspects of style and dialect are brought to the fore, usually through punning. These materials can, and should, be used to boost the stylistic awareness of foreign language learners on all levels of language structure and function: from phonetics to pragmatics. This awareness, or stylistic metacompetence, is instrumental in teaching and learning foreign language for communication, as part of the declarative-knowledge ("know-that") component thereof. Examples are provided of many categories of such, mostly phonostylistic trivia.

Trivium	Questions, answers, speculations, remarks
	Pre-pausal voiceless alveolar stop (/t/) deletion in natural speech; how fast is natural? unreleased /t/? 3 m Google hits of "up today", 15 m for "up-to-date"
	Pre-pausal voiced alveolar stop (/t/) deletion in fast speech; unreleased? less preferred than voiceless; did he really delete?, check on: http://www.matt-home.freeserve.co.uk/sounds/bond.html (only Lazenby did: , almost)
	Cluster simplification by (word-final) voiceless alveolar stop deletion; other examples: na kar(t)ce, natomias(t), stronnic(tw), zamias(t), wpros(t); full clusters only retained in very formal, careful or self-conscious speech; 'ease of pronunciation' as the main motivating factor in both languages: physio-articulatory reduction
	/tš/ cluster simplification by coalescence to /č/; regarded as 'sloppy' pronunciation (heavily marked phonostylistically and/or dialectally in Polish); examples: czeba, cząść, czymać; same physio-articulatory motivation as above; notice pun on "czepiać"; does English have the trzy/czy contrast? Compare: courtship, lightship, nightshade, nightshirt, nutshell, sweatshop
	Jocular, metaphonetic reversal of the above: separating the affricate /č/ into a cluster of stop+fricative; not a natural phonetic process; notice additional punning on "skur"/"z kur" showing regressive devoicing in obstruent clusters
	Whole syllable deleted: "vowels" --> "vows"; natural fast-speech process of schwa reduction/deletion ---> /l/ syllabification ---> /wl/ sonorant cluster simplification; other such words: bowel, dial, towel, trial, trowel, vowel; this reduction is sensitive to word frequency; triphthongs generally are variably pronounced
	Heavily substandard /i/ lowering/centralization; functions as a salient phonostylistic marker of Warsaw accent; which English phonostylistic features function similarly? Cockney's? in the EFL context? which of these features should be actively taught/acquired by foreign learners? anomalous spelling of /f/ shows cross-stylistic regressive cluster devoicing; predicted EFL problems in, e.g.: absent, abstract, landscape, obstacle, vodka Q: what is the only Polish word with 4 y's in it?
	Dialectal final obstruent voicing before voiced onset (in sandhi position); mostly western Poland ('Poznań-Kraków accent'); predicted problems in strings like: aboud books, blag night, deeb down, eage man, halve done, etc.; "Greg" may be partly motivated by the short form of Gregory
	Some rather explicit material here! illustration of how Polish speech is (phonetically) perceived by Americans: spelling reflects pronunciation, rather than morphonology "Dobshe" ---> the cluster is devoiced in fast speech, often with loss of final vowel: "dopš"; if this is felt to be bi-syllabic, the nucleus of the second syllable must be the fricative (!) "Pshtoa" ---> cluster /owa/ is reduced in fast speech to /oa/, this is similar to English triphthong reduction in words like vowel – see above "Shishkego" ---> consonant cluster reduction in fast speech: /f/ drops word-initially, and /t/ drops in the medial /stk/ cluster (see "NIK" above); is /s/ actually retracted to /š/ before /k/ in Polish? Why do Americans hear it this way? "Suhai" ---> consonant cluster reduction in fast speech: /w/ glide drops between an obstruent and /u/; similar: dugi, guchy, gupi, gówny, obsuga, suszny, sużba, tumacz, wedug
Jodee Berry, 26, won a contest to see who could sell the most beer in April at the Hooters in Panama City Beach. She said the top-selling waitresses from each Hooters restaurant in the area were entered into a drawing and her name was picked. She believed she'd won a new car. She was blindfolded and led to the restaurant parking lot, but when her blindfold was removed she found she was the winner not of a Toyota, but a toy Yoda doll.	This pun only works in American English where /t/ and /d/ are neutralized into flap; in British English the two strings are not homophonous; what other such cases are there across Atlantic? What are the two varieties: dialects? accents?; "One nation divided by a common language" (George Bernard Shaw); strictly speaking, the pun is prosodically heterophonous, even in AmE
	Another example of cross-Atlantic pronunciation difference: the (non)gliding onset of /u/ after /t/, other such words: tube, tumour, tune, tutor; different prosody in the two readings, like with "Toyota"; slightly off-colour conundrum: "What is even better than roses on a piano? Tulips on an organ!"
	A case of code/style-mixing, commonly encountered in the speech of Polish Americans and Polglish philologists :-); not to be confused with diglossia (= the existence of "high" (formal) and "low" (informal, familial) dialects of a single language, such as German) or pidgin (= an artificial language used for trade between speakers of different languages); notice the 'polonizing' spelling of "image" with the 'accented' <dż>; why is this preferred (Google=116) to "ymydrz" (Google=0)?
	Your own analysis here :-)