Query re ANYMORE

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:32 PM -0400 4/13/01, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
>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?
>
Some items from the hallowed archives--

first, the relevant OED entry and two non-U.S. citations found therein:
===============
OED more, 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'

1898 _Eng. Dial. Dict._ I. 63/1  A servant being instructed how to act,
will answer `I will do it any more.'

1920 D. H. Lawrence Women in Love (1921) xiii. 159 `Quite absurd,' he
said. `Suffering bores me, any more.'
===============
(The OED cites don't actually differentiate positive from "normal"
anymore but all the others given there are susceptible of analysis as
instantiating the "normal" negative polarity item.)

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 anymore, e.g.

Anymore, it is/I do/they are/...

I don't know if Birkin could have chosen to say "Anymore, suffering bores me."

Here's a useful excerpt from a posting of Arnold's:
============
Date: Fri, 4 Nov 94 21:20:16 EST
From: Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at ling.ohio-state.edu>
Subject: Re:  positive "anymore" again

[standard recent source, not yet cited explicitly on the current thread]

Murray, Thomas E.  1993.  Positive _anymore_ in the Midwest.
   Timothy C. Frazer (ed.), "Heartland" English: Variation and
   Transition in the American Midwest (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of
   Alabama Press), 173-86.

[which concludes...]

   Positive _anymore_ occupies a special position in the
   Midwest.  Geographic patterns of its use show unquestionably
   that it is a linguistic feature...that has spread and continues
   to spread outward from those regions known to have been settled
   most heavily by eighteenth-century Scotch-Irish immigrants
   and their descendants - especially Appalachia and the Ozarks,
   but also including the Ohio, Missouri, and central-Mississippi
   Valleys.  [this makes positive ANYMORE another item in the
   inventory of dialect features - NEED/WANT + Vpsp, YOU-UNS,
   REDD UP, NEBBY `nosy', to cite some additional items
   michael montgomery provided on the ADS mailing
   list a while back - that go back to ulster and ultimately
   to scotland.]  More interesting, perhaps, is that patterns of
   its usage in its various forms suggest an implicational scale
   effect: most regions that accept and use increasingly rarer
   forms also accept and use all of the more common ones; and
   those regions not using the common forms do not use the rarer
   forms, either.  Furthermore, a lack of sociolinguistic
   patterning suggests that the users of positive _anymore_
   regard it not as a marker of nonstandard or ungrammatical
   speech, but merely as a syntactic construction to be
   incorporated into one's vocabulary.
==================
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):

Date:         Mon, 10 Mar 97 23:50:25 EST
From:         Larry Horn <LHORN at YaleVM.CIS.Yale.edu>
To:           American Dialect Society <ADS-L at UGA>

some evidence that positive "anymore" is indeed spreading outside of its
original area, even among non-linguists:  The speaker is a sportscaster on
local New York all-sports radio WFAN, Joe Benigno.  Joe is, like me, a native
Noo Yawka, and wears it proudly, r-lessness and all.  He's actually a guy who
used to call in so regularly that he was given his own show to host, albeit
one that starts at 1:00 a.m. or so.  So anyway here he is complaining about
how inconsistently the home town basketball team, the New York Knicks, have
been playing, just following the post-game show after "another agita special".
What he says is "The Knicks are a different team from quarter to quarter
anymore".  Only, given the regional loyalty, they're "a different team from
kwawta duh kwawta anymaw".  (Sorry for the transcription; ascii doth make
dialect novelists of us all.)  Somehow the combination of the indigenous
vocalic clusters and the very much non-indigenous use of "anymore" struck me as
particularly incongruous.
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