Magnolia Mouth, Zero Plurals, and Cluster Simplification (minicast)

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Welcome to another mini-cast from A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

We’re still on our summer break, but we’re also still absorbing and responding to all your emails and phone calls, which are still arriving in their usual unstoppable stream.

By all means, you can still let us know what you’d like to hear on our brand new episodes coming up in the fall by dropping us a line at words@waywordradio.org.

Drew called us from Lasseter, Alabama.

He’s noticed that one of his fellow teachers tends to write words that should be plural as singular.

For example, she might say, I graded all 50 tests, T-E-S-T, instead of, I graded all 50 tests, T-E-S-T-S.

Why does she do that? She’s not stupid, right?

As Drew finds out, it’s not a simple mistake to make.

It comes from certain interesting features of Southern English.

I was calling to ask you about an anomaly I’ve noticed in one of the teachers at the school I teach at.

I’m a high school teacher in the area.

And being a Latin teacher, I tend to notice things about words like an email that come in.

And there’s one teacher who does all the makeup testing for us in the morning that whenever an email goes out, she will treat the word test like it’s a zero plural.

Tell me what you mean by that.

For instance, instead of saying there will be 25 tests in the morning, the email will say there will be 25 tests in the morning with no S on the end.

-huh.

So she’s actually writing this rather than speaking it.

Right, right.

Because it might have something to do with when you say tests, that S might get absorbed into the sound of the T or something, and she just learned it wrong.

But I don’t know.

I wanted to know if that was a thing that happens commonly or if it just happens with this one particular person.

Let me ask you, and this is significant, is she an African-American woman?

She’s not.

She’s actually kind of an Old South lady.

She’s got what my friends call magnolia mouth.

Magnolia mouth.

I love that.

Oh, yeah.

It’s like when the L drops off the end of the word, like we go to school rather than school.

Right, school.

Did she screw in light bulbs?

Exactly, yeah, light bulbs.

Elle has a tough time with magnolia mouth.

Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, so that’s the kind of, that’s how she talks.

And so I wanted to know if that was an element of that, if that commonly happens with that accent or what.

Well, there’s a couple things happening here probably.

You already mentioned what we call cluster simplification, and this is where consonants that appear as a cluster become hard to pronounce.

And in the case of tests, it’s spelled T-E-S-T-S, right?

T-E-S-T-S.

Right.

Let’s just talk about speaking for a second.

You actually, most of us, almost never pronounce the T.

If we are pronouncing the T, it’s because we’re thinking about the word.

We think we’re saying the T.

And we might even try to convince others we’re saying the T.

But if you listen to yourself on the tape and examine it with the phonological equipment, you’ll find that the T is not in there at all.

And so some people will do that when they’re speaking aloud.

But it doesn’t explain exactly why she’s dropping the S off.

What she’s hearing here is that the cluster simplification is just making it sound like Tess to her.

She may not even pronounce the T or the final S.

She’s only pronouncing one S.

And so what’s happening is called a, you might like this as a Latin teacher, a Geminet.

It’s well known in African American vernacular English, which is a standard dialect of English in North America.

It’s got rules.

It has grammar.

It’s something that you can recognize throughout black speakers and throughout the continent.

It’s common also, by the way, in some features of white Southern English because they have a lot of interplay there and a lot of history together.

Right.

They do something that’s called their plural S marker is lacking.

Okay.

It’s what you call the zero plural.

They turn words that actually should have a plural into words that kind of behave like mass nouns.

And it’s particularly significant when that mass noun is being counted in what they’re saying.

So if she says 50 makeup tests or all of the test, 50 and all are counting the test.

And she might actually have this rule in her own grammar that says, I don’t need to make this plural if I’ve already indicated that it’s a plural.

And using 50 and all does that.

So there’s a logic to it.

I don’t know without observing her directly, but there’s some real solid things that are happening here that demonstrate that she has some dialect features of her language that make it vary.

Now, this is mostly about the speech that we’re talking about.

And Drew, I think you know where I’m headed here.

It doesn’t explain why she’s not catching that in her own writing.

Right.

She should be catching that.

She should still be putting the S on the end of that.

She’s probably doing some kind of sub-vocalization where she’s thinking about things and then kind of writing them how she’s thinking about them instead of looking at the text as a text instead of a transcription of her thoughts.

Does that make sense?

A lot of mistakes that we make in our speech, particularly homophonic errors, are because we’re thinking about the words in our head instead of thinking about the words on the paper.

Okay, great.

Well, thanks a lot.

That really helped explain it.

So, Drew, what are you going to do with this information?

I’d probably just store it away and be okay with her writing test on the emails from now on.

I was just curious as to what it is because she’s a lot older than I am, a lot more experienced teacher.

So I’m not going to push anything or try to correct it because that would be highly improper.

But I had my curiosity to hear that there’s a reason for it.

Yeah, there really is an internal logic to it, I think is what you’re saying, Grant.

Yeah, yeah.

And I would say that you’re taking the right approach by not bringing it up with her.

Treat it kind of as fieldwork.

You’re the field worker.

She’s the subject.

You’re witnessing real interesting things happening in language.

Yeah, and every time you hear it, you can think, Grant and Martha, aren’t they great?

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For A Way with Words, I’m Grant Barrett in New York City.

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