the curious grammar of Ohio

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:55 AM -0700 10/28/04, Peter A. McGraw wrote:
>California?  Wow!
>
>There was a discussion of positive "anymore" on this list a long time ago,
>but actually I wonder if that terminology captures what's distinctive about
>the usage.  I think I picked up positive "anymore" in college in Ohio.
>I've used it comfortably ever since, and I don't feel particularly
>outlandish using it here in the Northwest.  What I never picked up, and
>what still sounds regional to me, is sentence-initial "anymore," whether
>positive or negative.

Sentence-initial "anymore" is never a negative (polarity) usage,
since it's not within the scope of negation.  Of course it's possible
to get "Not anymore it isn't" (with negative concord), but then the
"anymore" is not initial.

>Neither "Anymore, I always use positive 'anymore,'"
>nor "Anymore, I never use positive 'anymore'" seems natural to me, but I
>think both would be natural to speakers in the "homeland" of this usage.
>

If you think of "anymore" as being basically like "nowadays" with a
slightly different time-frame (covering the range of what would have
to be "nowanhours" as well as "nowadays", as when a poker player at
an all-night game might complain "I was getting really good hands in
the first couple of hours of the game, but anymore they've been
garbage"), the initial occurrence isn't surprising.  Also, as we've
discussed here in the past, not all cases of "anymore" without an
overt negative trigger involve positive "anymore", e.g. "It's hard to
find a good [whatever] around here anymore", where "hard" (for
non-pos-anymore speakers) can't be replaced by "easy".  Similarly for
"All he does anymore is lie on the couch, drink beer and watch
football" or "Only masochists root for the Mets anymore": these are
well-behaved negative-polarity licensing environments and thus not
diagnostic for pos. anymore.   On the other hand, when Birkin, a D.
H. Lawrence character in _Women in Love_, acknowledges "Suffering
bores me any more", that's positive "anymore" (Midlands, not
Midwestern variety).


larry