Having "good grammar" and a "correct pronunciation" can be an obsession for some native English speakers; and wherever there is an overweening concern with purity and correctness, hypercorrection can certainly result. There has always been a trend among urbanites generally towards elegantese, that I notice has in recent years generated over fifty instances of hypergallicism in particular, with other European cultures exerting considerably less xenophonetic attraction. This relatively unexplored, innovative aspect of the language has to do with the longstanding fashion of pretentiously striving after a French-like articulation of a number of words, whether of French origin or not. This trendy "francophonophilia," if you will, has three phonological symptoms manifested in a noticeable number of lexemes, and can be boiled down to (i) de-affrication, (ii) word-end stressing, and (iii) end-grapheme silencing. Speakers of elegantese, then, when pronouncing a word or phrase thought to be of French extraction, may apply one of these speech-enhancing rules. I have plotted the elicited variants of about sixty lexemes against the following phonresthetic scale in search of patterns in the phenomenon: Hyper- Dysphonic Neutral Euphonic Hyper- Lexeme Etymon dysphonic (--- I ---- (-- I --) --- I ---) euphonic
Relation:
中華民國第八屆英語文教學研討會英語文教學論文集=Proceedings of the eighth conference on English teaching and learning in the Republic of China，頁37-53
