"all" = very; quite

Arnold M. Zwicky zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU
Tue Oct 18 00:38:51 UTC 2005


On Oct 17, 2005, at 4:19 PM, Jon Lighter wrote:

> So new that those exx. don't even sound like English to me.

> ...She all walks in.
> Yeah I all screamed when we hit the skunk...

some months ago we thought we could predict that these wouldn't
occur.  then we started googling, and got tons of examples.  the
skunk example was my find, in pages and pages of examples with
   pronoun subject + "all" + manner-of-speaking verb (in simple
present or past)
(as Prof. Manner-of-Speaking, i got this verb class to search for).

by the time the collection task got all boring, i was starting to
find the examples not too bad, bordering on ok.

arnold



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