Date: Wed, 20 Sep 1995 16:36:16 EDT

From: David Bergdahl BERGDAHL[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]OUVAXA.CATS.OHIOU.EDU

Subject: Re: Positive Anymore



From: NAME: David Bergdahl

FUNC: English

TEL: (614) 593-2783 BERGDAHL[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]A1[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]OUVAX

To: MX%"ADS-L[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu"[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MRGATE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]OUVAX



Labov does mention that positive anymore is strictly midland, and that northern

and southern dialect speakers respond with a "huh?!" He also notes that 90% of

the tokens of ANYMORE are found in complaints; if a person doesn't whine, s/he

doesn't use it!



Wm Labov, What Is A Linguistic Fact? which corresponds to "Empirical Foundations

of Linguistic Theory"



"Faced with a sentence like JOHN IS SMOKING A LOT ANYMORE they said they had

never heard it before, did not recognize it as English, thought it might mean

'not smoking', and showed the same signs of bewilderment that we get from

Northern speakers outside the dialect area. (34)



footnote to above: "See Labov 1972c for evidence of the persistent confusion of

non-ANYMORE speakers who revert to the wrong semantic interpretation of 'still'

even after many years of exposure to the anymore dialect." (35)



footnote 39 (34)