Query re ANYMORE

[Alice Faber]

Hmm. My parents live in an area of the Hudson valley that was part of an
original patent to the Livingstone family and had a lot of 17th-18th
century Scots influence (on top of the Dutch, of course). Their town is
Ancram, named after Ancrum in Scotland, which, according to local lore, was
the ancestral seat of the Livingstones. Oh, yeah...and some natives of the
area have garden variety "positive anymore". When I used a positive anymore
sentence to give my parents an example of syntactic variation among
dialects, my mother's reaction was "yes, Clara talks like that" (Clara's a
friend of hers whose family has been in the area for several hundred years.)

Beverly Flanigan said:
>Yes, your last comment is interesting--in particular, why some
>Scots-Irish-App. usages went all the way west and others stayed in the more
>insular South Midland/Appal. area east of the Mississippi.  But--I talked
>to a linguist from Northern Ireland recently who said that Ulster Scots
>(=Scots Irish) does NOT have "positive anymore"; it only has the negative
>form.  I don't know the origin of "positive anymore"--anyone?
>
>At 05:16 PM 4/13/01 -0400, you wrote:
>>I wasn't trying to make the claim that the usage is uniquely
>>Pittsburghese.  I do find it interesting that the local popular media
>>have latched on to some of these features, and especially that this one
>>appears in one of the earlier examples of public discourse about the
>>"local dialect" (the articles I am working with go back to the early
>>1950s, but really ramp up in frequency during the '70s).  I'm also
>>interested in how some of these Appalachian/Scots features grew legs
>>while others didn't.
--
Alice Faber                                       tel. (203) 865-6163
Haskins Laboratories                              fax  (203) 865-8963
270 Crown St                                   faber at haskins.yale.edu
New Haven, CT 06511                               afaber at wesleyan.edu