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<div>At 6:32 PM -0400 4/13/01, Beverly Flanigan wrote:</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Yes, your last comment is
interesting--in particular, why some<br>
Scots-Irish-App. usages went all the way west and others stayed in
the more<br>
insular South Midland/Appal. area east of the Mississippi.
But--I talked<br>
to a linguist from Northern Ireland recently who said that Ulster
Scots<br>
(=Scots Irish) does NOT have "positive anymore"; it only
has the negative</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>form. I don't know the origin of
"positive anymore"--anyone?<br>
</blockquote>
<div>Some items from the hallowed archives--</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>first, the relevant OED entry and two non-U.S. citations found
therein:</div>
<div>===============</div>
<div><font color="#000000">OED<b> more</b>, 4a, dial. (chiefly
U.S.) used in affirmative as well as negative contexts in the sense
'now, now-a-days, at the present time; from now on'<br>
<br>
1898 _Eng. Dial. Dict._ I. 63/1 A servant being instructed how
to act,<br>
will answer `I will do it any more.'<br>
<br>
1920 D. H. Lawrence Women in Love (1921) xiii. 159 `Quite absurd,' he
said. `Suffering bores me, any more.'<br>
===============</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">(The OED cites don't actually
differentiate positive from "normal"<i> anymore</i> but all
the others given there are susceptible of analysis as instantiating
the "normal" negative polarity item.) </font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">I've also heard it claimed that Ulster
Scots WAS the source, so maybe it just doesn't have positive anymore
anymore. (I don't have any non-U.S. cites for fronted<i>
anymore,</i> e.g.</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Anymore, it is/I do/they
are/...</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">I don't know if Birkin could have chosen
to say "Anymore, suffering bores me."</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Here's a useful excerpt from a posting of
Arnold's:</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">============</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Date: Fri, 4 Nov 94 21:20:16 EST<br>
From: Arnold Zwicky <zwicky@ling.ohio-state.edu><br>
Subject: Re: positive "anymore" again</font><br>
<font color="#000000"></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">[standard recent source, not yet cited
explicitly on the current thread]</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Murray, Thomas E. 1993.
Positive _anymore_ in the Midwest.<br>
Timothy C. Frazer (ed.), "Heartland" English:
Variation and<br>
Transition in the American Midwest (Tuscaloosa: Univ.
of</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"> Alabama Press), 173-86.<br>
</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">[which concludes...]</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"> <br>
Positive _anymore_ occupies a special position in the<br>
Midwest. Geographic patterns of its use show
unquestionably<br>
that it is a linguistic feature...that has spread and
continues<br>
to spread outward from those regions known to have been
settled<br>
most heavily by eighteenth-century Scotch-Irish immigrants<br>
and their descendants - especially Appalachia and the
Ozarks,<br>
but also including the Ohio, Missouri, and
central-Mississippi<br>
Valleys. [this makes positive ANYMORE another item in
the<br>
inventory of dialect features - NEED/WANT + Vpsp, YOU-UNS,<br>
REDD UP, NEBBY `nosy', to cite some additional items<br>
michael montgomery provided on the ADS mailing<br>
list a while back - that go back to ulster and ultimately<br>
to scotland.] More interesting, perhaps, is that
patterns of<br>
its usage in its various forms suggest an implicational
scale<br>
effect: most regions that accept and use increasingly rarer<br>
forms also accept and use all of the more common ones; and<br>
those regions not using the common forms do not use the
rarer<br>
forms, either. Furthermore, a lack of sociolinguistic<br>
patterning suggests that the users of positive _anymore_<br>
regard it not as a marker of nonstandard or ungrammatical<br>
speech, but merely as a syntactic construction to be<br>
incorporated into one's vocabulary.<br>
==================</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">and finally an old posting of mine
alluding to the recent spread of this variable across the Hudson (I
have this little item on tape and play it every time we do syntactic
variation in Dialects class, to the consternation of many of my East
Coast students):</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font
color="#000000">Date:
Mon, 10 Mar 97 23:50:25 EST<br>
From: Larry Horn
<LHORN@YaleVM.CIS.Yale.edu></font></div>
<div><font
color="#000000"
>To:
American Dialect Society <ADS-L@UGA><br>
</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">some evidence that positive
"anymore" is indeed spreading outside of its<br>
original area, even among non-linguists: The speaker is a
sportscaster on<br>
local New York all-sports radio WFAN, Joe Benigno. Joe is, like
me, a native<br>
Noo Yawka, and wears it proudly, r-lessness and all. He's
actually a guy who</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">used to call in so regularly that he was
given his own show to host, albeit<br>
one that starts at 1:00 a.m. or so. So anyway here he is
complaining about<br>
how inconsistently the home town basketball team, the New York
Knicks, have<br>
been playing, just following the post-game show after "another
agita special".<br>
What he says is "The Knicks are a different team from quarter to
quarter<br>
anymore". Only, given the regional loyalty, they're
"a different team from</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">kwawta duh kwawta anymaw".
(Sorry for the transcription; ascii doth make</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">dialect novelists of us all.)
Somehow the combination of the indigenous<br>
vocalic clusters and the very much non-indigenous use of
"anymore" struck me as<br>
particularly incongruous.</font></div>
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