Hypercorrection


In sociolinguistics, hypercorrection is the nonstandard use of language that results from the overapplication of a perceived rule of language-usage prescription. A speaker or writer who produces a hypercorrection generally believes through a misunderstanding of such rules that the form or phrase they use is more "correct", standard, or otherwise preferable, often combined with a desire to appear formal or educated.
Linguistic hypercorrection occurs when a real or imagined grammatical rule is applied in an inappropriate context, so that an attempt to be "correct" leads to an incorrect result. It does not occur when a speaker follows "a natural speech instinct", according to Otto Jespersen and Robert J. Menner.
Hypercorrection can be found among speakers of less prestigious language varieties who attempt to produce forms associated with high-prestige varieties, even in situations where speakers of those varieties would not. Some commentators call such production hyperurbanism.
Hypercorrection can occur in many languages and wherever multiple languages or language varieties are in contact.

Types of overapplied rules

Studies in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics have noted the overapplication of rules of phonology, syntax, or morphology, resulting either from different rules in varieties of the same language or second-language learning. An example of a common hypercorrection based on application of the rules of a second language is the use of octopi for the plural of octopus in English; this is based on the faulty assumption that octopus is a second declension word of Latin origin when in fact it is third declension and comes from Greek.
Sociolinguists often note hypercorrection in terms of pronunciation. For example, William Labov noted that all of the English speakers he studied in New York City in the 1960s tended to pronounce words such as hard as rhotic more often when speaking carefully. Furthermore, middle class speakers had more rhotic pronunciation than working class speakers did.
However, lower-middle class speakers had more rhotic pronunciation than upper-middle class speakers. Labov suggested that these lower-middle class speakers were attempting to emulate the pronunciation of upper-middle class speakers, but were actually over-producing the very noticeable R-sound.
A common source of hypercorrection in English speakers' use of the language's morphology and syntax happens in the use of pronouns.
Hypercorrection can also occur when learners of a new-to-them language try to avoid applying grammatical rules from their native language to the new language. The effect can occur, for example, when a student of a new language has learned that certain sounds of their original language must usually be replaced by another in the studied language, but has not learned when not to replace them.
In addition, the special case of a pseudo-hypercorrection has been identified where standard usage is at issue, but accidentally, i.e., where a speaker luckily produces a correct result.

English

English has no authoritative body or language academy codifying norms for standard usage, unlike some other languages. Nonetheless, within groups of users of English, certain usages are considered unduly elaborate adherences to formal rules. Such speech or writing is sometimes called hyperurbanism, defined by Kingsley Amis as an "indulged desire to be posher than posh".

Personal pronouns

In 2004, Jack Lynch, assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, said on Voice of America that the correction of the subject-positioned "you and me" to "you and I" leads people to "internalize the rule that 'you and I' is somehow more proper, and they end up using it in places where they should not – such as 'he gave it to you and I' when it should be 'he gave it to you and me.
However, the linguists Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum write that utterances such as "They invited Sandy and I" are "heard constantly in the conversation of people whose status as speakers of Standard English is clear" and that "hose who condemn it simply assume that the case of a pronoun in a coordination must be the same as when it stands alone. Actual usage is in conflict with this assumption."

H-adding

Some British accents, such as Cockney, drop the initial h from words; e.g., have becomes ave. A hypercorrection associated with this is H-adding, adding an initial h to a word which would not normally have one. An example of this can be found in the speech of the character Parker in the marionette TV series Thunderbirds, e.g., "We'll 'ave the haristocrats 'ere soon". Parker's speech was based on a real person the creators encountered at a restaurant in Cookham.
The same, for the same reason, is often heard when a person of Italian origins speaks English: "I'm hangry hat Francesco", "I'd like to heat something". This should not be expected to be consistent with the h-dropping common in the Italian accent, so the same person may say "an edge-og" instead of "a hedgehog" or just say it correctly.

Hyperforeignism

Hyperforeignism arises from speakers misidentifying the distribution of a pattern found in loanwords and extending it to other environments. The result of this process does not reflect the rules of either language. For example, habanero is sometimes pronounced as though it were spelled "habañero", in imitation of other Spanish words like jalapeño and piñata. Machismo is sometimes pronounced "makizmo", apparently as if it were Italian, rather than the phonetic English pronunciation which resembles the original Spanish word,. Similarly, the z in chorizo is sometimes pronounced as /ts/, whereas the original Spanish pronunciation has or.

English as a second language

Some English-Spanish cognates primarily differ by beginning with s instead of es, such as the English word spectacular and the Spanish word espectacular. A native Spanish speaker may conscientiously hypercorrect for the word escape by writing or saying ', or for the word establish by writing or saying ', which is archaic, or an informal pronunciation in some dialects.
When learning English, German speakers often have trouble pronouncing since the phoneme is absent from German. The letter also makes the sound in German. After German speakers master the pronunciation of , some of them hypercorrect to incorrectly pronounce the phoneme in English as without realizing it.

Additional examples

  • Using the verb affect in place of effect in cases where the intended meaning is "to bring about". The two terms can be pronounced very similarly, so English speakers may be taught that affect is a verb whereas effect is a noun as a helpful rule-of-thumb when writing. However, effect is the appropriate choice in cases such as "to effect change", and affect can in rare cases function as a noun when referring to a person's observed emotional state.
  • The misuse of adverbs in an attempt to modify linking verbs. One might say "She feels badly", believing that badly should be used since it follows a verb, and adverbs typically end in –ly. However, in this case, feels functions as a linking verb between subject and its descriptor, and thus the adjective form is appropriate. Other common instances of linking verbs include appears in "He appears healthy" and seem in "They seem nice".

    Chinese

Native speakers of southern Chinese varieties who learn Standard Mandarin Chinese often have trouble pronouncing the prestige variety's retroflex consonants, as these consonants are absent from southern varieties. As a result, in Singapore Mandarin, which is influenced by southern Chinese varieties, words with the phoneme /ʂ/ in Standard Mandarin are often realized as . For words with /s/ in Standard Mandarin, Singaporean speakers also sometimes pronounce a hypercorrect realization with , such as labels=no for Standard Mandarin lit=so. A study found that male speakers were more likely to produce these hypercorrect forms than female speakers.

Serbo-Croatian

As the locative case is rarely found in vernacular usage in the southern and eastern dialects of Serbia, and the accusative is used instead, speakers tend to overcorrect when trying to deploy the standard variety of the language in more formal occasions, thus using the locative even when the accusative should be used : "" instead of "".

Hebrew and Yiddish

argues that the following hypercorrect pronunciations in Israeli Hebrew are "snobbatives" :
  • the hypercorrect pronunciation instead of for 'beaches'.
  • the hypercorrect pronunciation instead of for 'France'.
  • the hypercorrect pronunciation instead of for 'artist'.
The last two hypercorrection examples derive from a confusion related to the kamatz gadol Hebrew vowel, which in the accepted Sephardi Hebrew pronunciation is rendered as but which is pronounced in Ashkenazi Hebrew, and in Hebrew words that also occur in Yiddish. However, the kamatz katan vowel, which is visually indistinguishable from kamatz gadol, is rendered as in both pronunciations. This leads to hypercorrections in both directions.
  • The consistent pronunciation of all forms of as, disregarding and forms, could be seen as hypercorrections when Hebrew speakers of Ashkenazic origin attempt to pronounce Sephardic Hebrew, for example,, 'midday' as , rather than as in standard Israeli pronunciation; the traditional Sephardi pronunciation is. This may, however, be an example of oversimplification rather than of hypercorrection.
  • Conversely, many older British Jews consider it more colloquial and "down-home" to say, and, though the vowel in these words is in fact a patach, which is rendered as in both Sephardi and Ashkenazi Hebrew.
Other hypercorrections occur when speakers of Israeli Hebrew attempt to pronounce Ashkenazi Hebrew, for example for religious purposes. The month of Shevat is mistakenly pronounced, as if it were spelled *. In an attempt to imitate Polish and Lithuanian dialects, , which would normally be pronounced, is hypercorrected to the pronunciation of,, rendering as and as.