"A Whole Nother" and "Alls I Know Is"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Oct 6, 2006, at 7:01 PM, Beverly Flanigan wrote:

> I'm taking Arnold Zwicky's word for it , actually.  But he and I
> have both
> studied complementizers, including double complementizers like
> "like that"
> (Southern), "as if" (traditional but perhaps fading, largely
> replaced by
> "like"), "as though," and the Old English "swa swa," etc.  I think
> there
> are more Old and Middle English analogues, but I can't recall them off
> hand. Arnold?

i got this story from:

Mark Liberman, "All's I know is ..." 7/24/04:

   http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001253.html

(who quotes discussion on the Linguist List)

and from the knowledge that "as" has a history as a relative marker;
entry 24a for "as" in the OED has this use ("to those as have no
children"), marked as obsolete in standard english but common dialect
in england and the u.s.

>
> At 05:15 PM 10/6/2006, you wrote:
>> Beverly, you say that "the 'all as' origin has been pretty well
>> established." Would you, by chance, have a cite handy? If you're
>> wondering why I might want to see a cite that *supports* my analysis,
>> it's like this. Many years ago, ca.1977, I intuited the "all as"
>> analysis. When I suggested it to my "alls"- speaking roommate from
>> Vermont, he poo-pooed the idea. Given that he wasn't some naive
>> native
>> speaker, but, rather, a grad student in linguistics at M.I.T. who is
>> now a tenured professor at a Big Ten university, I respected his
>> opinion and made no effort to pursue my intuitive analysis.
>> However, I
>> didn't forget it.

well, its history and its current status for speakers are two
different things.  "all as" is very likely the historical source.
but by now the contracted form is just an idiomatic expression, and
people who use it don't necessarily also have "as" as a relativizer;
there's no reason for users of it to have any knowledge of its
history, in any case.

it's a shame that the OED entry doesn't have any occurrences of "all
as".  as it stands, we have no record of the putative source for
"all's"/"alls", though it's likely that someone has looked at the
history.  (let me remind you all again that i'm not a historical
linguist, and get what i know about the history of english from
reference books, or by badgering knowledgeable colleagues.)

the OED also doesn't have an entry for "all's"/"alls"; that, i think,
should be remedied.  i'm away from my library, so i don't know if
DARE has an entry, but i'd expect it to.

for what it's worth, the M-W Open Dictionary has an entry submitted
by an anonymous poster in 2005:

Used at the beginning of a sentence to describe a limit.

"Alls I need to do is to bring you there and you can get all
messed."; "Alls she got me was this stupit smausasage eggAmuffin at
the MACdonol's next to the Kmark down da skreet..."

-----

paul brians speculates that the form might result from anticipating
the "s" of "is"  (others on the Linguist List speculated it was from
german "alles").  but brians thinks the form is part of a larger
idiom "alls I know is ...", though in fact the form occurs more
widely (though "alls I know is ..." is surely its most frequent use);
you can google up occurrences of "alls I knew was", "alls I saw was",
"alls I heard was", "alls I thought (about/of) was", etc., with "was"
rather than "is", and examples with additional material intervening
between "alls" and "is"/"was": "alls I ever saw was", "alls I know
now is", "alls I saw there was", "alls I need to do is", and so on.
so the anticipation idea doesn't look particularly promising.

the german-origin hypothesis might conceivably explain some
occurrences of "alls", but it founders as a general account, since
"alls" is found in sections of the u.s. with no significant german
influence, and widely in AAVE.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)

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