Positive anymore

Look up any more in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Positive anymore is the use of the adverb anymore in an affirmative context.[1] While any more is typically a negative/interrogative polarity item used in negative, interrogative, or hypothetical contexts, speakers of some dialects of English use it in positive or affirmative contexts,[notes 1] with a meaning similar to nowadays or from now on.[1]

Positive anymore occurs in some varieties of North American English, especially in the Midlands variety spoken in parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, New Jersey, and Missouri; its usage extends to Utah and some other western U.S. states.[2]

Positive anymore also occurs in parts of Ireland and Northern Ireland.[3]

Some linguists theorize that the North American usage derives from Irish or Scots-Irish sources.[4][5]

Examples

The following examples illustrate the use of positive anymore in Irish or American English speech, as recorded by lexicographers or sociolinguists.

Notes

  1. This refers to morphosyntactic context, and not necessarily to connotation. Positive anymore may express negative feelings about a situation, but it is not a negative polarity item, which can occur only with a negative word such as not or doesn't.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "any more, adv.". Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2002.
  2. Labov, William (1973), "Where do grammars stop?", in Shuy, Roger, Report on the Twenty-Third Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Studies, Washington: Georgetown University Press, pp. 43–88
  3. 1 2 Trudgill, Peter (1984). Language in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  4. Murray, Thomas E. (1993), "Positive anymore in the Midwest", in Fraser, Timothy C., "Heartland" English: Variation and Transition in the American Midwest, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, pp. 173–186
  5. Montgomery, Michael (2006). From Ulster to America: The Scotch-Irish Heritage of American English. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation.
  6. Wright, Joseph, ed. (1898). "any". The English Dialect Dictionary volume 1. London: Oxford University Press. p. 63. Retrieved 21 December 2009.
  7. Wolfram, Walt; Schilling-Estes, Natalie (1998), American English: Dialects and Variation, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell
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