Seen as this is the 1930s

I watched ITV's Harry Price: Ghost Hunter over the Christmas break, which starred Rafe Spall as the eponymous psychic investigator/faker/unmasker.

One linguistic fact of note is the spelling of his first name, which I assume is a respelling reflecting the pronunciation of the name Ralph, which is now usually pronounced as it looks.

But what caught my ear was the very modern-sounding language. One character used vowels which I would have said were characteristic of Estuary English or MLE: monophthongs where RP would have had a diphthong, for instance. And Rafe Spall himself said, at one point, seen as rather than the normatively correct seeing as (meaning more or less because or since). I'm hesitant to say that this is anachronistic, as it's almost invariably a 'recency illusion' when anyone makes an argument like that. Rather, it's probably just that we expect posh and middle class people in period dramas to speak in RP, and when they don't we find it jarring. But I can't find out how old this variant is, because it's virtually ungoogleable and I'm not sure where else to go to look for it. Seen as has indeed increased massively since 1960, but I can't filter out the false hits like we were seen as inferior, where it's not the same thing. Anyone happen to know about this? (Sorry if the chart is not the right size - html skillz are failing me today. Follow the link above to the original.)

Serial verbs, rhoticity and detective work

 

There's a song out at the minute called Come save me by a band (or maybe a person, I don't know) called Jagwar Ma. It's quite good - you can listen to it at Soundcloud. It caught my attention because although the title is Come save me, he clearly sings Come and save me in the chorus. I wonder if it was a typing error somewhere that's ended up becoming official.

The come save me construction, we'll call the serial verb construction (because that's what it is, basically, though it's not as productive as in languages that have proper serial verb constructions), and let's call the other, with and, the conjoined verb construction. It probably has a proper name but I'm teaching in a few minutes so don't have time for extensive (or any) research.

To my ear, the serial verb construction is much more a US usage, and in the UK we would tend towards the conjoined verb construction. This is unsubstantiated by anything other than my own intuitions, and corpus research would no doubt prove me wrong (especially as I think the serial verb construction has increased in use over here in recent years - though that may well be the recency illusion). But there we are, that's my intuition.

So then, I thought, where are they from, these Jagwar Ma people (or this Jagwar Ma person)? Rather than, you know, google it, I used linguistics. First, I eliminated the US, or at least most of it. Almost all US accents are rhotic (r-pronouncing) (some are not, in the South for instance), so they would pronounce the /r/ at the end of Jagwar. That would mean that the name wouldn't rhyme, and surely you don't give yourself a name like that without intending it to rhyme. That leaves the UK as a possibility, but what about Australia, for example? They're also non-rhotic down under. Well, it turns out that Jagwar Ma is from Sydney (yeah, I googled it), which fits just nicely with the non-rhoticity and also makes the words rhyme very well. I can't easily find out if the serial verb construction is more common than the conjoined verb construction, or vice versa. I'd bet that the singer/song-writer has the conjoined verb construction, though.

A side note: I expect that, if the serial verb construction is indeed on the rise in the UK, some people would complain about this terrible Americanism sweeping the language of today's young people. But Wikipedia tells me that Maggie Tallerman (1998) gives this as a construction surviving from Early Modern English, so yaa boo sucks to those people.