Not A Newbie, but Maybe Worth a Mention

[Mark Davies]

>> > EDM comes in two flavors, the older standard without of, and the newer
> variant (which spread rapidly in the 20th century) with of.
>    -of EDM: too big a dog (cf. ordinary degree marking: a very big dog)
>    +of EDM: too big of a dog

Corpus data bears this out nicely. In the 100 million word TIME Corpus (1920s-2000s) (http://corpus.byu.edu/time), there was a fairly good decrease in -Of EDM in about the 1970s:

Years   Tokens  Tokens per million
----    ----            -----
1920s   65              8.5
1930s   88              7.0
1940s   122             7.9
1950s   140             8.3
1960s   135             8.4
1970s   80              5.9 **
1980s   70              6.2
1990s   65              6.7
2000s   36              5.6

In the 360 million word Corpus of American English (http://www.americancorpus.org), there is a big increase in +Of EDM (or, in other words, decrease in -Of EDM, continuing the trend from the TIME Corpus) during the past 15-20 years:

Years           +Of     -Of     % +Of
------          ----    ----    ----
1990-94 30      642     4.7%
1995-99 38      561     6.8%
2000-04 45      462     9.7%
2005-07 37      264     14.0%

What is really interesting (to me, at least) is the unbroken directionality of this shift. In other words, somehow in 2010-2015, we'll probably be using +Of EDM at about 20-30% (vs. -Of EDM), even though nobody is really aware of the difference (well, except for us linguists). Another nice example of the "invisible hand" at work in linguistic change.

Mark Davies

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Mark Davies
Professor of (Corpus) Linguistics
Brigham Young University
(phone) 801-422-9168 / (fax) 801-422-0906
Web: davies-linguistics.byu.edu

** Corpus design and use // Linguistic databases **
** Historical linguistics // Language variation **
** English, Spanish, and Portuguese **
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