"all's" and "how's"/"what's"

[Wilson Gray]

A very informative comment, arnold. Thank you.

-Wilson

On 10/10/06, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      "all's" and "how's"/"what's"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> DARE does indeed have a (short) entry for "all's", which it
> identifies as a contraction of "all" and the pronoun "as" (meaning
> here the relativizer "as") and gives the meaning 'all that'.  only
> one example, from 1967 fieldwork in amherst, mass., where several
> people in their middle or late 20s were said to use it frequently.
> there's also once cite for the variant "al(l)st".
>
> elsewhere in DARE, relativizer "as" is marked as "formerly
> widespread, now chiefly Midl, Sth.
>
> in any case, "all's" gets over ten thousand relevant webhits, so it's
> certainly in wide use.
>
> along the way, i case across a herb stahlke Linguist List posting of
> 2/10/92, noting that "how's come" for "how come" was widespread in
> his part of the midwest (he teaches at Ball State).  about as many
> webhits as "all's".
>
> so it looks like there are two histories here: "all's" and "so's",
> with contracted relativizer "as"; and some kind of extension of "how"
> in the idioms "how about" and "how come", giving "how's about" and
> "how's come".  oh dear, and "what's about" too:
>
> Hello, I heard that we could use right mouse button as we used left
> button, but it seems that it's not true... so, what's about it? ...
> chattyfig.figleaf.com/pipermail/flashcoders/2003-August/086199.html
>
> (quite a pile of these.)
>
> [oh yes, then there's the -s of dialectal "anyways", which the OED
> identifies as the marker of an adverbial genitive, as in "always".]
>
> arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)
>
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