Oftenly

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:34 PM -0500 8/22/07, Cohen, Gerald Leonard wrote:
>For some other reason? Yes, try blending: "often" + "frequently."
>
>Gerald Cohen

My problem with the diagnosis of blending is that it's very difficult
to demonstrate (without some psycholinguistic evidence, perhaps).
Consider for example the frequent occurrence (mentioned in this
thread and previous ones) of "fastly":  a blend of "fast" and
"quickly"? "fast" and "rapidly"?  "fast" and its adverbial antonym
"slowly"?  Or just the reconstruction of (adverbial) "fast" with the
widely productive adverbial "-ly"?  How can we tell?  The latter
might traditionally be termed analogical formation, but there's no
*specific* target the way there is with blends.  If children, in
particularly, come out with "fastly", it seems implausible that
they're blending "fast" with the far less frequent and later-learned
"quickly"/"rapidly".   I suspect that "oftenly" and "seldomly" can be
motivated by an account of the morphology of adverbial "-ly" without
invoking specific "-ly"-bearing adverbs like "frequently" or
"occasionally" or "rarely", although the more these adverbs are
used/heard, the more likely the analogical formation will be.  I'm
happy to invoke blending in cases where there's evidence for a
particular source pair, but I'm not sure why we'd want or need to
generalize it to these cases.

LH

>
>________________________________
>
>From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Michael Quinion
>Sent: Wed 8/22/2007 3:39 AM
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>Subject: Oftenly
>
>
>
>A subscriber pointed out that a large number of examples of this form can
>be found online (and I've found examples in newspapers). The OED says "Now
>U.S. regional (rare)", which is clearly outdated. Would its reappearance
>be the result of hypercorrection, or for some other reason?
>
>--
>Michael Quinion
>Editor, World Wide Words
>E-mail: wordseditor at worldwidewords.org
>Web: http://www.worldwidewords.org <http://www.worldwidewords.org/>
>
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