[Ads-l] A positive _anymore_ in Britspeak?

[Wilson Gray]

> This isn’t necessarily positive "anymore”

Struck me the same way. You can't say, after all,

*If you're going to waste my time, _nowadays_then, quite frankly, you can
sling your hook!

To paraphrase Lucy, "I had to send it quick! It was starting to make sense."

On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 11:24 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> This isn’t necessarily positive "anymore”, since it’s in the antecedent of
> a conditional, which (unlike, say, the consequent of a conditional) is a
> licensing environment for negative polarity items like “any”, “ever”, “lift
> a finger”—
>
> If you ever eat any of that you’ll suffer ill effects.
> *If you eat that, you’ll ever suffer any ill effects.
>
> If you lift a finger to help him, you’ll regret it.
> If he lifts a finger to help you, I’ll be surprised.
>
> If you so much as move a muscle, you’re a dead man.
>
> These aren’t positive “ever”s, “any”s, etc., just negative polarity items
> in non-overtly negative contexts.
>
> Labov and others have pointed to variation in acceptability for “anymore”
> in various frames; for many speakers, negative polarity items are
> especially at home in antecedents of conditionals with negative outcomes
> including threats, as in the example you cite, which sounds fine to me (as
> a non-positive “anymore” speaker).
>
> That’ s not to say true positive “anymore” is absent from British
> English.  It’s been associated with Scots-Irish varieties, and even in
> Midlands-speak:
>
> “Suffering bores me any more”
> —Birkin in _Women in Love_, as cited in the OED and elsewhere
>
> LH
>
> > On Jul 12, 2018, at 11:09 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> >
> > Heard in a scene in some random flick in which an asswipe of an HR
> clark😜
> > puts in her place a woman who, merely on the basis of her qualifications,
> > asks him whether there mightn't😜 be a position available superior to the
> > one that he has offered her:
> >
> > "I've just told you what's on offer! If you're going to waste my time,
> > _anymore_, then, quite frankly, you can sling your hook!"
> >
> > Green's: sling one's hook "to leave"
> >
> > --
> > -Wilson
> > -----
> > All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
> > come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> > -Mark Twain
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org