anymore

[Dan Goncharoff]

No one has mentioned these, so I thought I would throw them in the pot:

I am comfortable using the adjectival "any more" as two words: "Is there any
more chicken?"

I use the negative adverb "anymore" in speech, but hate writing it, although
I will use it in semiformal writing.

I can't think of an instance of the positive adverb that doesn't clang in my
ear.

DanG
who spent about six years of his life in the UK, so his speech isn't pure
anything anymore...

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 5:23 AM, Damien Hall <D.Hall at kent.ac.uk> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Damien Hall <D.Hall at KENT.AC.UK>
> Subject:      anymore
>
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> Can any American linguists comment on a hunch I have that the speaker's
> mental representation of /EnimOr/ contributes to its positive or negative
> status?
>
> In BrE, /EnimOr/ (/EnimO:/) is overwhelmingly spelt as two words, 'any
> more', and this is entirely negative-anymore territory.  In AmE as a whole,
> obviously both positive and negative anymores are represented, and I believe
> I'm right in saying that both spellings are also represented, 'anymore' and
> 'any more'.  It seems to me that positive 'anymore' there is always just
> that, 'anymore', never 'any more', and that negative 'anymore' can be
> either.  So, restricting the sampling universe to people who at least
> sometimes spell /EnimOr/ as two words, can anyone say whether there's a
> correlation here, whereby the negative sense is more often spelt as one word
> and the positive sense as two?
>
> Damien
>
> --
>
> Damien Hall
>
> University of Kent (UK / Royaume-Uni)
> Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, 'Towards a New Linguistic Atlas of France'
> Projet de recherche: 'Vers un Nouvel Atlas Linguistique de la France'
>
> English Language and Linguistics, School of European Culture and Languages
> Section de Langue et Linguistique Anglaises, Faculté de la Culture et des
> Langues Européennes
>
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