more on Pittsburgh talk; with a digression on nanas

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:28 PM -0400 10/23/00, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
>"Positive anymore" is common throughout the middle of the country and is
>rapidly spreading westward.  Again, see studies by Tom Murray (and Frank
>Parker before him).  Variation may occur in where the 'anymore' is in the
>sentence--initial, medial, or final.  Murray found it to be most dense in
>Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, but it's also at least as far west as Kansas
>(according to him).  Interestingly, I heard it twice last spring in
>California, in the speech of my aunt and uncle (siblings in their 70s, one
>living in LA and the other in San Diego).  Since they grew up in (then)
>"negative anymore" Minnesota and didn't go West until they were full adults
>(one was about 40), it is clear that they picked up the positive form in
>the new environment, where it must now be common (I have an attestation
>from Oregon too).  After 20 years in Ohio, I find that I use it now and
>then, and my colleagues from Akron and central Indiana use it frequently.
>
The DARE entry makes it clear that the range of "positive anymore" is
a lot wider in the U.S. than it may appear from Tom's paper, and the
OED entry (s.v. MORE 4a) makes it clear that it's not limited to the
U.S.  Additional evidence:  "Suffering bores me any more" --Birkin,
in D. H. Lawrence's _Women in Love_.  I've heard it a bunch in
Southern California, but my favorite recent evidence for the spread
of this feature well beyond the halcyon Midwest is this excerpt I
fortuitously taped from a sports commentary by the echt Noo Yawker
Joe Benigno on WFAN Sports Radio in New York following a close win by
our local pro basketball team, the Knick(erbocker)s:

"A-nuddah agita special.  Da Knickuhbockuhs are a different team from
quawta to quawta anymaw"

larry