Oftenly

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Aug 23, 2007, at 5:03 PM, Jerry Cohen wrote:

>     "Fastly" based on its antonym "slowly" seems to be something
> that only children would produce (although it could  later be
> imitated by adults, if they so wished).  I can't imagine an adult
> producing "fastly" under the influence of "slowly."

that's not exactly what people have been saying about "fastly" and
"oftenly".  in particular, larry horn referred to the morphology of
words in "-ly", that is, to a *pattern* of word-formation, not to
specific model words.  in the case of "fastly", the pattern in "-ly"
can be seen in "slowly", "quickly", "rapidly", and a number of less
frequent words (like "sluggishly" and "briskly"). and in the case of
"oftenly", the pattern in "-ly" can be seen in "rarely",
"frequently", "occasionally", etc.  the irregular ("-ly"-less)
adverbs "fast" and "often" are then replaced by the more regular
"fastly" and "oftenly" "by analogy with" the "-ly" adverbs -- but by
the weight of a general pattern, not necessarily by analogy from any
specific word.  such regularizations are very common.

> But I *can* imagine it being produced by a blend, since blending
> frequently occurs in adult speech--as slips of the tongue, it is
> true, but then that is an integral part of the nature of blending.

here's the step in the reasoning where i object (again and again).
you go from seeing an expression as a combination of two other
expressions -- an observation about a relationship purely of form --
to what looks like an imputation of a mechanism that gives rise to
this combination in particular productions.  but what looks like a
combination of two expressions can arise in a number of different
ways (more than the ones i listed in my last posting, in fact), not
just from the combo type i listed as #2 (a species of slip-of-the-
tongue) in my previous posting.

look, no one's denying that the slips of the tongue i labeled as #2-
type combos in my list do occur in adult speech, and with at least
some frequency.  in fact, when i posted on these matters last year, i
listed some morphological errors of this type from my own
collections, and more can be found in fromkin's collection.
characteristically, the frequency of any *particular* #2-type combo
is low (even "herrible", which i've collected as a clear inadvertent
slip -- the speaker corrected himself, in embarrassment -- is not all
that frequent, even though it appears every so often as a quote from
Winnie the Pooh, in "herrible heffalump" and allusions to that
phrase, rather than as a slip of the tongue), and in such combos
there's no evidence that the speaker intended to produce the
expression in question.

i'm not denying that #2-type combos exist; i'm denying that *certain*
data are (predominantly) instances of this type.  yet when i question
a particular claim you repeatedly take me to be denying the
significance of slip blends ("blends" in the narrow sense, that is,
#2-type combos) in general.

>      ... So "fastly," if produced spontaneously in adult speech,
> would like[ly] derive from a blending of "fast" + "quickly."

this i deny.  the frequency of "fastly" and "oftenly" in writing
(from adult native speakers of english) seems far too great for most
occurrences to be slips.  in addition, these occurrences bear no
signs that those who produced them recognize them as errors.  people
are even willing to list them in the Urban Dictionary.  in addition,
usage authorities warn against them -- a clear sign that people are
producing them intentionally, unaware of their non-standard status or
believing them to be merely colloquial variants.

(i'd say the same for "tad bit" and some of the other cases we've
discussed here.)

>      Now, if "oftenly" arose in adult speech, I see no problem in
> invoking blending *at least as a possibility.*

now, there's a subtlety.  the very same production can arise in
different ways.  it's entirely possible that standard english
speakers will occasionally produce a sentence with multiple negation,
like "I didn't see nothing", as a syntactic blend of two standard
negations, "I didn't see anything" and "I saw nothing" -- as a
production error resulting from the competition between two
alternative plans.  but the huge bulk of such examples will not be #2
combos; they'll simply represent a non-standard system of negation
marking, in which the multiple negatives are exactly as the speakers/
writers intended.

similarly, it's entirely possible that "fastly" and "oftenly" are
occasionally produced as speech errors, a result of competition
between "fast"/"quickly" and "often"/"frequently" (or some other
specific "-ly" adverbs).  but the bulk of the examples don't look
like inadvertent slips.  people are even willing to defend their word
choices.

> I've been noticing (and often writing down) blends for almost 40
> years.  Some may be more convincing than others, but the overall
> picture I have is of a linguistic feature which occurs more often
> than the linguistic community as a whole has recognized.

no one's attacking this part of your life's work, jerry.  it's
entirely possible to recognize the significance of #2 combos without
seeing them everywhere.

>     In another message today Arnold quotes an earlier message of his:
>> i think that jerry's use of "blend" here stretches the word beyond
> all usefulness.  it's just wrong to use a single term for all
> expressions that can be analyzed as a combination of two expressions.<
>
>      Beyond all usefulness?  I respectfully disagree.  If blending
> really is very frequent in language; if there are lexical blends as
> well as syntactic ones (and this isn't original with me); and if
> people frequently say "often" and "frequently," I see nothing
> daring in saying that if a form "oftenly" arises, it may be a blend
> of the two words.  Now, maybe "oftenly" arose by analogy with the
> antonym "rarely" or "seldomly."   But to rule out blending because
> the term allegedly is "beyond all usefulness" is to run the  risk
> of setting aside a very useful tool in analyzing speech errors and
> the origin of various idiomatic features of English.

my argument against a #2-combo analysis in this particular case
doesn't follow from terminological considerations, but from the
details of this case.  i brought up the terminology (*after*
conceptual analysis, i note) only because i think you're bewitched by
it: you're inclined to take all sorts of combos ("blends" in a very
broad sense) to be at root #2 combos ("blends" in a narrow sense),
and that just muddles things up hopelessly.

note that i'm saying that most occurrences of "fastly" and "oftenly"
are not in fact speech errors at all: they are (in my terms)
advertent mistakes (vs. inadvertent mistakes), (in goffman's terms)
doesn't-know-better mistakes (vs. knows-better mistakes), or (in
nunberg's terms) thinkos (vs. typos).  or, in still other terms,
false knowledge (false from the point of view of the standard language).

speakers of non-standard varieties produce slips of the tongue just
like speakers of standard varieties, and we wouldn't want to lump
these errors in with features of the non-standard varieties (some of
which, like regularized inflectional forms, look a lot like things
that occur as errors in other varieties).  the same is true of young
children and second-language speakers; understanding what they're
doing involves distinguishing slips from features of a variety that
merely differs from the speech of their larger community.

arnold

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