the curious grammar of Ohio

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:17 PM -0400 10/28/04, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
>Thanks for the Lawrence cite, Larry!  I recall being told by an Irish
>linguist once that positive anymore isn't used in Ireland, but Michael
>Montgomery said it is.  This suggests it's used more widely in the British
>Isles.  I'll check Hughes and Trudgill too.
>
I've heard that it's extant in Ulster, if not the rest of Ireland,
and Arnold's post below, citing Michael Montgomery, implies as much;
of course it may well be regional there too.  Since there seems to be
interest in its distribution, here are a couple of hoary excerpts
from our archives.  (By the way, on positive "anymore" being foreign
to Minnesota--that's interesting to me, because I ran into it not
infrequently in Madison, WI in the late 1970s.)

larry
=======

============
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 a 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.