Thursday, February 13, 2014

Run, run, run

Hello everyone.

It's been a while since my last post, but thankfully there is an ongoing and interesting conversation amongst the regulars (thank you Gaynor, Bryan, Bert, and Yorick)

This latest post came to me while I was working upstairs in my house building bedrooms for the kids. I was talking to my wife about some detail or other when I caught myself saying, "I run up the stairs".

What I actually meant was, "I ran up the stairs", which would have been the correct verb form for the imperfect tense of run - ran. There is nothing particularly unusual in this, many people in various dialects will use the present tense form of verbs to express actions in the past. What did strike me as interesting was that there may be another, much more subtle, element to this construction.

When I said, "I run upstairs", there was no doubt in my mind that I was referring to something that had happened in the past, even though the verb form was actually in the present tense. The interesting thing was the pronunciation, not of the verb form run rather the pronoun I.

I pronounced the I as /æ/ like the "a" in bat. It seems that this pronunciation changed the meaning of the sentence and therefore the tense of the verb to imperfect, that is, past tense. To compare I pronounced the sentence with the standard pronunciation of "I" /aj/. Pronounced like this, the verb form run maintains its temporal meaning of present tense, that is, "I run" (something that happens in the present, or more usually in English, something I do habitually) "I run to work on Tuesdays", for example.

Try it yourself and see what you think.
Is there a difference when you say  /æ rʊʊpstɛrz/ (pronounced like the "a" in bat)
as compared to /aj rʊʊpstɛrz(pronounced like the "y" in my)
It is my feeling that there is a difference between the two when said in natural, normal-pace speech. Whether this is peculiar to the Warrington dialect is another question.