awfully/awful

[Arnold Zwicky]

i've reordered these postings to put them in temporal order.  top-
posting is evil.

| This.

|| What's wrong with top-posting?

>> Original message from Alison Murie, Sun 3/8/2009 11:39 AM:
>>
>> "That smells an awfully lot like godless socialism to
>> me." (D.M.Green," Smart is the New Stupid") I suppose thinking of
>> "lot" as an adjective is what brought on this bit of infelicity.

> On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 6:07 PM, Cohen, Gerald Leonard
> <gcohen at mst.edu> wrote:
>>
>> This looks like a blend: "awfully much" + "an awful lot."

On Mar 8, 2009, at 4:02 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> Oddly enough, G, this [meaning, presumably, "an awful lot"] is
> unknown in BE, at least in that of my era. We
> say / said(?) "a (whole) lot." "Awfully much" sounds like something
> that the cute, little, white English girl in a book would say; "an
> awful lot" sounds like working-class white speech, not exactly
> trend-setting dialects amongst the colored, needless to say.

Alison's idea is that "an awfully lot" is a kind of hypercorrection in
which an adverb is used where the corresponding adjective would have
appropriate ("lot" being a noun, not an adjective -- granted, a noun
functioning as a determiner, but still a noun).  (as is well known,
hypercorrect adverbs for adjectives are common in a number of contexts.)

actually, it's probably more accurate to say that "an awfully lot"
*originated* in hypercorrection, but has now spread as a variant form,
picked up by speakers from those around them.  in favor of this idea
is that googling on "awfully lot" pulls up an enormous number (indeed,
an awfully lot) of hits.  and that DARE has an entry for "awfully
lot" (where it's labeled a "hyperurbanism"), with this nice quote from
AmSp in *1945*: "The curious idiom, _an awfully lot_ ... seems to be
growing more common."

against Jerry's blend proposal, Wilson suggests that both of the
candidate contributors are unavailable, or at least strongly
disfavored, in BE -- implying that if "an awfully lot" is used by BE
speakers, it can't be a blend of these candidates.  of course, if "an
awfully lot" generally isn't used by BE speakers (as i suspect is the
case, but it's hard to tell from the google record), then the status
of the candidate contributors in BE isn't relevant to the question of
how "an awfully lot" arose.

[digression: the status of the candidate contributors in english in
general might be relevant.  if one or both of them is
sociolinguistically or stylistically very restricted, then the
enormous number of "an awfully lot" examples would speak against the
blend proposal.

most people come at such questions the way Wilson did above -- by
considering an expression and imagining the sort of person who would
say it.  as i've said several times before, this is an absolutely
wretched way of going about things.  in the case at hand, i don't
think there's any evidence that for white speakers, "an awful lot" is
associated with the working class; i think it's just general informal
usage.

as for "awfully much", my first instincts were much like Wilson's, but
i understand that my subjective impressions are as unreliable as
anyone else's, and there are plenty of hits for "awfully much" that
seem to be sociolinguistically and stylistically unremarkable, as in
these examples:

   This sounds awfully much like how Wikipedia operate. They all speak
with one voice, and if you disagree, then they will try to "re-train"
you so that you do ...
www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/04/your-take-roundupbelievers-negativists-debate-wikipedias-trustworthiness110.html
  [note zero-plural "Wikipedia", referring not to the site, but to the
people who manage it]

   The thing that looked awfully much like a V was actually a U.
www.goneflowers.de/archive/index.php/t-12450.html ]

back to the blend proposal.  "an awfully lot" has all the uses of "a
lot" and standard "an awful lot": as a determiner with mass-noun heads
("an awfully lot of money") and with plural-count-noun heads ("an
awfully lot of tourist souvenirs") and with zero heads ("hearing an
awfully lot about me"), and in various sorts of adverbials ("looks an
awfully lot like a soccer ball").  the blend proposal would have to
posit blending of
"awfully much/many" and "an awful lot" in all of these cases.

and it would have to account for the extension of the pattern in "an
awfully lot" to degree adverbs other than "awfully".  there are a fair
number of examples of "a really lot", and then, in decreasing numbers
(of raw hits): "a very lot", "an extremely lot", "a terribly lot".
(there are probably more, but this sampling will do.)  these would all
have to be treated as blends of
   (1) Adv much/many
and
   (2) a(n) Adj lot.

there's no problem with (1) here, but there are a few problems with
(2): the Adv "very" has no Adj counterpart, and "an extreme lot",
though attested, is not very frequent.

well, someone could claim that "an awfully lot" originated as a blend
(rather than a hypercorrection) more than 50 years ago.  either way,
this expression was then available as a model for extension to other
degree adverbs, and a new pattern of (non-standard) modification came
into being.

arnold

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