anymore

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:48 PM -0500 4/3/11, Gordon, Matthew J. wrote:
>Is "I can't believe that you're hungry anymore" really standard?
>That's the claim made by Patricia O'Conner here:
>http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2011/04/anymore-3.html
>
>I'm a positive anymore speaker, so I can't tell, but I would think
>that this usage would only be standard if the 'anymore' applied to
>the main clause, which isn't the first reading I get.
>
>-Matt Gordon
>
I'd say this is more about the licensing of negative polarity items
in contexts where they "shouldn't" occur than about positive
"anymore".  Speakers of all stripes will accept e.g.

"I don't believe I'm hungry anymore"

This would have been a better example for O'Conner to choose to make
her point, and it's typically explained (in work on "neg-raising" or
"negative transportation" dating back to a paper of Robin Lakoff's in
1969 and work by various other linguists around the same time) by
positing a rule that raises the negative from the embedded clause (as
in "I believe I'm not hungry anymore"), after it's had its chance to
license the negstive polarity "anymore", into the main clause.  Now
this isn't really necessary with other negative polarity items like
"any" or "ever", that can be separated from their negatives without
much problem and with no neg-raising involved:  "I didn't claim I've
ever eaten any jellyfish" is fine for most speakers, and there's no
equivalence to "I claim I've never eaten any jellyfish".  But
"anymore", like "until Tuesday", is usually pickier.

So why is O'Conner's sentence pretty good for many, probably most,
non-pos. anymore speakers without the recourse to neg-raising?  The
late Lee Baker, in a 1970 paper in the very first volume of
Linguistic Inquiry, talked about similar cases ("You can't convince
me that...") and posited acceptability by logical (or effective)
equivalence.  Someone saying "I can't believe that p" is asserting
something like "(Whatever you say,) I will firmly believe that
not-p".  So the claim "I can't believe that you're hungry (anymore)"
amounts to something like the claim "I firmly believe that you're not
hungry (anymore)".  Since the "anymore" is possible in the latter,
it's possible in the former.

LH

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