Intrusive "of"

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Nov 9, 2008, at 10:31 AM, Alison Murie wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Alison Murie <sagehen7470 at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Intrusive "of"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> If ADS-L hadn't taught me to suppress my winces at a lot of
> "substandard" speech, I think I'd be  wincing more often lately at the
> intrusion of "of" into ADJ-NOUN expressions ("big of a thing,"  "dark
> of a blue" &c.). Is this an attribute of a particular dialect........
> which is taking over American speech?

it's not new, and it's very widespread; for many young speakers, it's
simply the right way to say these things, and the of-less variant
strikes them as archaic, hyper-formal, or simply wrong.  we had a
thread on the of-ful variant here back in february 2004 ("as ADJ of a
N as"), with some bibliography, and i have posted a number of times on
the phenomenon since then, here and on Language Log.

from my file on "exceptional degree modification":

[see Zwicky 1995 [available on my  website], which cites Abney
1987:324 and Radford 1993:85]

[MWDEU under of a gives seven examples, from 1976 (Erma Bombeck, in a
newspaper column) through 1987, with THAT, TOO, and HOW; all the
sources are American, and almost all are from speech; the earliest are
from the American Dialect Dictionary, from 1942 and 1943, though “It
is undoubtedly at least somewhat older.”]

[already labeled as incorrect by Copperud 1980:271]

[compendium of examples in:  Allen, Harold B.  1989.  The big of
syndrome.  American Speech 64.1.94-6.  and in:  Rapp, Linda L.  1991.
The big of syndrome: an update.  American Speech 66.2.213-20.]

[Joan Houston Hall on ADS-L 1/22/08: DARE's first quote (at the entry
for "of", section B subsense g) is from 1942 (Rawlings, Cross
Creek)... But Volume III was done before we
had access to any electronic sources, so there are doubtless earlier
examples.]

despite this history, exceptional degree modification is reported,
again and again, as a recent development.


> Jeanne Cummings on "Washington
> Week"  the other night, used the expression, "the ground shifted
> underneath of him."    "On top of," yes, but "underneath of
> "?.......hmmm.

this one i discussed on Language Log on 7/22/07, in a posting that
took off from a query from ... Alison Murie:

> http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004737.html

arnold

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