the curious grammar of Ohio

[Jonathan Lighter]

My DARE's not handy, there's a positive "anymore" in there from the 1920s.  IIRC, I sent a slightly earlier cite to OED a year or so ago.

Nothing in my undergraduate experience had prepared me for positive "anymore" when I came to Tennessee in the '70s.  Needless to say, everybody seemed to be using it.

I still don't use it myself, partly because I'm still unsure how to screw it into a sentence.

It took a few years to figure out how to use "might could," but positive "anymore" is a far greater challenge.

JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: the curious grammar of Ohio
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>Native of Southern Californian born 1947 into Appalachian family in
>California since 1925. Everyone in the family used *anymore* this
>way, and also this: "Anymore it seems everything's expensive." I
>do, too; and living in Oregon now I notice it's common. Are the two
>the same positive anymore? I'm not a scholar, not familiar with
>some of the terms y'all are using.
>
>Marsha
>

In neither your case nor the one below is there a negative polarity
trigger, so yes, I'd classify both of them as instances of positive
"anymore". What I remember from Labov's work is the demonstration of
how seriously wrong people are in figuring out what positive
"anymore" means in such examples if they're not speakers of the
relevant variety.

Larry
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
>>
> Poster: Wilson Gray >
> Subject: Re: the curious grammar of Ohio
>
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> If memory serves - and it probably doesn't - Labov(?) collected an
> example of positive anymore in Kansas(?) from back in the '60's. It
> went something like this.
>
> Q. Do you find anything wrong with the following sentence?
>
> "Cigarettes are really expensive, anymore."


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