Hypocorrection is a sociolinguistic phenomenon that involves the purposeful addition of slang or a shift in pronunciation, word form, or grammatical construction[1] and is propelled by a desire to appear less intelligible or to strike rapport.
[2] Originally, hypocorrection, or an accented pronunciation of words, may have stemmed from physical properties involved in sound production, such as aeroacoustics, anatomy and vocal tract shape.
Ohala mentions that hypocorrection happens when a listener fails to make use of compensation or, to be exact, when the listener lacks experience with a series of contextual discrepancies that allows them to execute such correction or cannot detect the conditioning environment for various reasons such as noise and the filtering associated with communication channels.
[4] When a listener restores a phoneme from its contextually-influenced realisation, normal speech perception involves the process of correction.
That is in accordance to a model proposed by John Ohala which involves synchronic unintended variation, hypocorrection, and hypercorrection.
"[4] As for the realm of the social aspect, the intentional use of hypocorrection or, for example, affecting a Southeastern American accent to sound less elitist involves "make-believe hesitations and colloquial language" that "work as affiliative strategies (softeners) etc.
"[6] Over time, hypocorrection has emerged by both physical features of voice production and affected accents, and it is typically used by people who do not wish to associate themselves with overly-sophisticated local dialects.
[7] Some forms of hypocorrection are attempts to give one's discourse a clumsy, colloquial, or even a broken and dysfluent style in introducing clever or innovating statements or ideas.
More often than not, hypocorrection allows the speaker, by toning down a potential self-flattering image, to avoid sounding pretentious or pedantic, thus reducing the risk of threat to the recipients' faces.
Hence, hypocorrection has the potential to change the listener's phonological grammar by what Hyman called "phonologisation," a process by which intrinsic or automatic variation becomes extrinsic or controlled.
[4] The listener misperception hypothesis of sound change[16][17][18] has been a worthwhile domain of inquiry over the years, partly because it makes testable predictions.
According to the area of research, phonological rules arise by mechanical or physical constraints inherent to speech production and perception.
The black fieldworkers were encouraged to use vernacular norms, including slang, to provide conversational contexts in which AAVE would be appropriate, regardless of the informants' backgrounds.
Some well-documented grammatical forms of AAVE that were frequently used by the African American interviewers were: It was observed during the interviews that once the informants started getting more comfortable or felt that they wanted to emphasise a point with the black fieldworkers, they would use more AAVE features in their speech although they used mainly Standard English in other circumstances.
[23] Perceptual compensation (PC) refers to the listeners' ability to handle phonetic variation because of the coarticulatory influence of surrounding context.
The experiment sought to find out how one's perception of a synthesised segment on a continuum between /r/ and /l/ was affected by the presence of another conditioning liquid consonant (/r/ or /l/).