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

[Wilson Gray]

I wouldn't say "widely in AAVE." I haven't ever heard "alls" used by
any AA's that I know, though, of course, that could be merely
coincidental. I was in my late 30's, i.e. in the ''70's, before I ever
heard it used by anyone. I personally know it only from hearing a very
trivial percentage of the EAVE-speakers that I know use it and then
only in the Northeast.

-Wilson

On 10/7/06, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "A Whole Nother" and "Alls I Know Is"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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-----
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