LINGUIST List 2.640

Thu 10 Oct 1991

Disc: Anymore

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Allan C. Wechsler, Re: 2.622 Anymore
2. Ellen Prince, Re: 2.622 Anymore
3. Geoffrey Russom, Re: 2.622 Anymore
4. Ron Smyth, Re: 2.622 Anymore
5. Rob Vousten, Re: 2.622 Anymore
6. Scott Delancey, Re: 2.626 Queries
7. Henry Rogers, Re: Anymore

Message 1: Re: 2.622 Anymore

[Linguist added back so I can correct myself and exonerate Quinn
publicly.]
 Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1991 11:48 EDT
 From: cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!cowanuunet.UU.NET (John Cowan)
 You write:
 > I haven't verified this reference, from Jim Quinn's _American Tongue and
 > Cheek_:
 >
 > "Quite absurd," he said. "Suffering bores me any more."
 > -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, _Women in Love_, xiii, p. 159.
 > (1920)
 You certainly haven't. What's more, neither has Quinn. >Women in Love<
 was, of course, written by D.H. Lawrence.
Ohmygod. The mistake was all mine, not Quinn's. I read the attribution
to Lawrence (p. 43 in Quinn), rolled over to my terminal, and typed
"Fitzgerald". Thanks for pointing this out.

Message 2: Re: 2.622 Anymore

i have no native intuitions about this, but it seems that there may be
another difference between positive anymore and nowadays: conventional
vs. conversational implicature. that is, 1 is ok but 2 is claimed by my
native informant students to be infelicitous:
1. people are really busy nowadays--and i guess they always have been.
2.#people are really busy anymore--and i guess they always have been.
if this is correct, then nowadays would simply have a conversational
implicature, cancellable by context, that things used to be different, whereas
positive anymore would have a conventional, i.e. uncancellable, implicature
to that effect. you native positive anymore speakers out there, is that right?
also, wrt michael kac's remark that positive anymore indicates a negative
feeling on the speaker's part, i think that was an artifact of the particular
data--in labov's interviews, people were always grumbling about how lousy
things had gotten. in other contexts one can certainly find positive anymore
without any negative feelings about the present state.

Message 3: Re: 2.622 Anymore

Thanks for the many and varied replies on "anymore."
-- Rick Russom

Message 4: Re: 2.622 Anymore

Steve Seegmiller's anecdote about cousins his own home town using 'anymore'
differently from him seems to support my observations about the couple from
Kingston Ontario who used it differently from everyone else. Again, I wonder
if this might be a ca where a few exposurcan trigger a different set
of restrictions. BTW, I was surprised to find that his example, 'It's hard
to find a job here anymore' is O.K. for me. Time to check the references
provided by Larry Horn and others.
Ron Smyth
smythlake.scar.utoronto.ca

Message 5: Re: 2.622 Anymore

On 'positive anymore':
In 1973 Labov published "The boundaries of a grammar: inter-dialectal
reactions to positive anymore". Reprinted in: Trudgill & Chambers (1991)
_Dialects of English_ London: Longman, pp. 273-288.
Rob Vousten

Message 6: Re: 2.626 Queries

For Tim van Baar: see John Okell's paper, "Still and anymore in Burmese",
in Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 4.2 (1979).
	I'm intrigued by your interest in "other languages in which
similar phenomena occur". It seems to me that the Standard English
situation is the unusual case--in which the anymore-equivalent is
restricted to negative contexts--and that one would expect most languages
to lack such a restriction. (I'm also puzzled by the puzzlement that
some people express about the meaning of positive anymore--isn't it
exactly the same as the meaning anymore in negative contexts, minus
the negation?
Scott DeLancey

Ron Smyth mentioned that Gary Prideaux, having grown up in Texas,
found 'anymore' common. I also grew up there, in Amarillo, fairly
close to Gary's home. I first heard of 'anymore' meaning 'nowadays' in
graduate school. On visiting home, I then discovered that my own
mother used it, as in 'we shop there anymore'. I am still perplexed at how
I missed it, or how it sneaked into the area while I was away at university.
Henry Rogers
Dept. of Linguistics
University of Toronto
rogersepas.utoronto.ca