Query re ANYMORE

[Beverly Flanigan]

Once again, I want to note that Pittsburgh ain't alone in the use of
"positive anymore"!  It's general throughout the South (and perhaps North)
Midland.  Most interestingly, I also heard it twice from my aging aunt (80)
and uncle (72) in California last year.  Since they grew up in Minnesota,
where we don't use it (or at least didn't when I lived there), these two
acquired it in California as full in-migrant adults (25-35 when they moved
out there).  So the form has clearly spread westward, far beyond
Pittsburgh, and even beyond Missouri (I heard it earlier from students from
Nebraska and Colorado).  There are more recent studies of this usage too,
by Tom Murray among others.

At 01:55 PM 4/13/01 -0400, you wrote:
>"Anymore" in an affirmative sense as "again" or "nowadays" is cited in
>at least two news/feature articles on Pittsburgh speech culled from
>local publications.  George Swetnam, "Pittsburgh Patois", Pittsburgh
>Press, 9-Sep-1959, p. 4 of Sunday Family insert, uses "You're getting
>fat, any more" as an example (he compares it to the use of the word
>"schon" in German).
>
>Si Bloom, "Every One Talks Funny But Us", The Pittsburgher, v.1, n.3,
>Aug. 1977 also comments on the positive use of anymore as a feature of
>local speech (as opposed to the interrogative and negative usage in
>"accent-battered New York City").
>
>A more scholarly citation:  Youmans, Gilbert, "Any More on Anymore?:
>Evidence from a Missouri Dialect Survey", American Speech, 1986, 61, 1,
>spring, 61-75 discusses the the positive and negative uses of "anymore"
>in data collected from Missouri college students' speech.
>
>Michael Montgomery wrote:
> >
> > Dear ADS-Listers:
> >
> > Is anyone familiar with _anymore_ as used in the sentences below?
> > This might seem to be the garden variety of the adverbial since
> > it apparently occurs only in negative contexts, but the sense
> > here ("again, from now or then on") is one that does not appear
> > in the OED or DARE (or any of several other dictionaries I have
> > consulted).  Part of what is unusual is the type of verb in
> > these (i.e. punctual) in these sentences, which are from the
> > speech of the Smoky Mountains of TN/NC.  I'd be grateful for any
> > comments or other attestations.  Perhaps there's a good lexico-
> > graphic reason why they are not to be found in dictionaries,
> > but I do not seee it.  They're perfectly idiomatic to me.
> >
> > Michael Montgomery
> > U of South Carolina
> >
> > He never remarried anymore.
> >
> > I said "Leery, if you say that anymore to this horse, I'll jump
> > on you."
> >
> > He never did come back to the fox hunt any more.
> >
> > I didn't live here anymore after that until about twenty-one
> > years ago.
> >
> > There was very little whiskey made back in there anymore.


_____________________________________________
Beverly Olson Flanigan         Department of Linguistics
Ohio University                     Athens, OH  45701
Ph.: (740) 593-4568              Fax: (740) 593-2967
http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm