As you might imagine, linguists have devoted an enormous amount of time to studying this issue. I haven't paid any attention to that research, though, so I can't say what they've found out about it.
So linguists are the bookish 14-year-olds who never encountered either The Lord of the Rings or Atlas Shrugged?
Yeah, sorry. That kind of research, and the time devoted to it, played a large role in my decision to leave linguistics. If you look in some of the major linguistics journals over the past twenty years or so there will be a lot of articles on this sort of thing. You might have to read some sort of introduction to generative syntax to understand them, though.
3: Well, some of them encountered The Lord of the Rings and became rather different sorts of linguists, but for the most part, yeah.
I don't remember a discussion of this phenomenon in The Lord of the Rings.
6: Someone didn't read all the appendices.
It is this sort of mountain on top of which I will not tell, and up myself I will not fuck.
The fascinating subtlety must have something to do with the commands being figures of speech and not actually commands.
"Go get me a pig's foot and a bottle of beer" is a figure of speech?
They're commands. They may not technically be imperatives.
I think the problem is more that it doesn't make sense for an imperative to have a past tense -- it's innately future oriented.
"Go get me a pig's foot and a bottle of beer" is a figure of speech?
Otherwise wouldn't "I went and got him a pig's foot and a bottle of beer" mean compliance?
But LB, there does exist a report of the fulfillment of the imperative "sit down", namely, "he sat down", which is in the past tense.
GREAT, NOW I HAVE TO USE THIS USERNAME FROM NOW ON. GO GET YOUR POTATO PEELER AND GO WAKE UP ZERO, YOU LAZY ASTERISK DOLLAR FUCK AT CENTS AND PERCENT.
5: A guy I went to hs with shows up in the History Channel, etc. talking about elvish and the tongues of Mordor or whatever.
"Go get me a pig's foot and a bottle of beer" is a figure of speech?
It's a euphemism.
14: the question is, does "he went and φed" correspond to "go φ!" as "he φed" corresponds to "φ!" simpliciter? As I said, it doesn't seem that way to my ear.
19: I think it does. "Go get me" is just a colloquizalization of "Go and get me".
Are "go sing!" or "go get me a pig foot and a bottle of beer" just syncopated versions of "go and sing!" and "go and get me a pig foot and a bottle of beer!"?
OPINIONATED SERGEANT SNORKEL seems to think so, and is an authority on these matters.
"He went and fucked himself" seems like a perfectly fine way to indicate compliance with "go fuck yourself" (bearing in mind that it's a figure of speech). "I went and got him a pig's foot and a bottle of beer" seems like a perfectly fine way to indicate compliance with "go get me a pig's foot and a bottle of beer". "He's going to go and tell it on the mountain" doesn't indicate compliance with "go tell it on the mountain", but "he went and told it on the mountain" does. (I'm not sure why you used a non-parallel construction for this one of the three examples.)
So I don't get your point.
Are "go sing!" or "go get me a pig foot and a bottle of beer" just syncopated versions of "go and sing!" and "go and get me a pig foot and a bottle of beer!"?
Syncopated?
Does the "go" add any meaning to sentences like "Go sing!" etc. ?
(bearing in mind that it's a figure of speech).
Irrelevant. Obviously what follows "go" needn't be a figure of speech.
(I'm not sure why you used a non-parallel construction for this one of the three examples.)
Likewise, on reflection.
Does the "go" add any meaning to sentences like "Go sing!" etc. ?
Yes. You certainly wouldn't say "Go stay right here" but you might say "Go stay over there."
26: doesn't "go sing!" generally mean "go [somewhere implied] and sing" (on stage, in the other room, whatever). I wouldn't say "go sing!" to someone who I wanted to stay put and start singing.
It's really convenient that the sole person here known to have any real linguistic knowledge has disclaimed any expertise in the particular phenomenon.
You're saying Teo has never fucked himself?
29 gets it right. I can imagine a world where "Go" would be an accepted shortening of "Go ahead", but we do no tlive in that world.
I wouldn't say "go sing!" to someone who I wanted to stay put and start singing.
But you might say "he went and sang" without implying that he budged an inch.
29 gets it right.
No! 28 gets it right first!
33: But that would be shorthand for "he went [ahead] and sang".
"he went and sang" without implying that he budged an inch.
Yeah, but it's a temporal "went", I think. He started singing.
25: Shortened by dropping things out of the middle.
FUCK AT CENT AND STAR DOLLAR, HEEBLE. NOW GET ME OFF THIS CLIFF SAPLING.
37: But syncopated doesn't mean shortened, does it?
39: Yes, it does. (It also means off-beat bossa nova rhythms, etc.)
28: Heebie is unfamiliar with the work of the late, great Rap Replinger.
I call adhoccery on 38.
Also, ||
tripe tacos, so good.
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Syncope, apocope, Hassenpfeffer Incorporated!
Anyway, I also am not a syntactician. But basically the things I would start thinking about here are (a) there are two different words "go" in English, one content (to move from a place to another) and one function (I'm going to sit here for 5 minutes).
and (b), you can't have a bunch of verbs in a row all with tense on them.
I think both of these two ideas are related to the OP.
45: Cecily, I'm sure nosflow just up and slipped.
further to (b), I think the "go" in the first type of sentence is imperative and the other verb (fuck, tell, get) are infinitive.
In the second sentences, you could say "he went and fucked himself" or "he fucked himself" but you can't have "went fucked" because this is Too Many Tenses. So it isn't related to the relationship between the first and second sentences, it is just related to general English constraints on conjugated verbs.
I THINK.
I also am kind of out of it and in bed sick with the Dreaded Lurgy, so who knows- I might be hallucinating this whole comment thread for all I know.
47: I am a sin tactician, master of cunning depravity.
He went to the mountain, whereon he told it.
He went to the goat, etc.
The "go" imperative implies that this thing is to be done elsewhere - sometimes that elsewhere is defined ("on the mountain") - sometimes it is not. So to comply, one goes somewhere else and does that thing.
I went to the kitchen and found a pig's foot and bottle of beer, and brought them to ben.
I might be hallucinating this whole comment thread for all I know.
If you're hallucinations get this dull, it might be time for better drugs.
(b), you can't have a bunch of verbs in a row all with tense on them.
Ok, but what about for instance "this window needs washed"?
So what if some stupid people had already brought ben his pig's foot and beverage?
Also, I don't know anything about this, but can you even have an imperative "go" (in any form) in a sentence that is declarative and not imperative? Maybe, maybe. Time and the Reverend Chomsky will tell.
If you're hallucinations get this dull, it might be time for better drugs.
If your grammar is this bad, maybe you should just shut up.
Also, I don't know anything about this, but can you even have an imperative "go" (in any form) in a sentence that is declarative and not imperative?
Certainly!
I told him, "go away, you smell!".
You will tell me that is cheating, and I will answer: yes, it is true that I have produced this sentence only by embedding the imperative "go" in a quotation.
53: A colleague of CA's was talking about a dress that "needs hemmed." I was intrigued.
"washed" isn't a verb there, it's an adjective that describes the window.
I think! In that dialect, can you say the window needs washed by someone?
57 I should have said "clause" instead of "sentence", especially since I was talking to you.
I would probably not say you were "cheating". It seemed more like "losing track of the issue at hand". On purpose? Who am I to judge.
neb-nose or nebby-nose (also nebshit) n. the kind of person who is always poking into peoples' affairs (Cassidy and Hall 1996).
Heh.
Not just Pittsburgh. It's in my idiolect.
60: The person who said it to me was from Indiana, I think. Man, and it is all over the interwebz.
I would probably not say you were "cheating". It seemed more like "losing track of the issue at hand".
I would call it cheating because I "lost track" on purpose in order to create a sentence that met the technical criterion while obviously not being to the point.
Ok, fine. It's a regionalism strongly associated with Pittsburgh.
52: this is exactly the kind of cruel trick my hallucinations are constantly playing on me. Constantly! I need new mitochondria is what I need. Ones that like hallucinations about aquariums, or the circus, or something else calm but trippy.
Or drugs might accomplish that, I guess.
63: well? Is "washed" a verb? Can you say a thing needs washed by an agent?
69: are you sure? That doesn't seem to be what it is suggesting to me.
I heard "needs done" first in OH, said by someone from NC. Yeah, needs done by somebody.
"Needs washing" is grammatical. "Needs to be washed" is grammatical. "Needs washed" is not.
On closer inspections those sentences are offered up as examples whose grammaticality is in question.
But the post has more discussion.
This construction isn't in my idiolect.
72: prescriptivism, prescriptivism, nix nix. Not grammatical in YOUR idiolect, maybe, but who died and made you Governor of Idaho?
Ok, I'm reading Murray, Frazer & Simon, "Need + Past Participle in American English".
"He went and [did such and such thing]" is a commonly used formulation in the bible. Not sure where that gets us.
I'm reading the wikipedia article about hortative moods. Did you know there is an INFRAhortative mood? There totally is.
"X needs washed by Y" sounds slightly off to me, but I don't know if I would call it ungrammatical.
I've run into "This kitchen needs must cleaned" from a North Carolinian. I love the construction, but it might not be an idiolect so much as the fact that my friend is crazy.
Yeah, as Ben says, Google says it's a participle. So, again, is it just a matter of something else dropping out? Namely "to be"? Forms of "to be" are "understood" (as in, not there) in lots of languages.
"Cryptic ned needs taught a lesson about prescriptivism" is ungrammatical. I'm having a hard time putting my finger on the rules for this construction. I think maybe only verbs that take no object work in this way.
s/reading/skimming/. Seems nondispositive so far, though there is a quotation from a post to ADS-l saying that "native users [of need + V-en] … often report that they [have] never heard any alternate form before going away to college or moving away" (ellipses and brackets as in article), suggesting (to me) that if it can't accept an agent the speech of these people must be kind of impoverished.
Sorry, I forgot there are no rules or logic.
Okay, this thread seems to have gotten mighty confused, so I should probably say more. I don't know enough about the relevant research to address neb's concern, but I do understand what he's saying here. The question is about syntax and doesn't have anything in particular to do with lexical semantics, except that some of the syntactic forms in question seem to be limited to (or at least strongly associated with) specific lexical items.
Basically, there are a bunch of English verbs that can be used in ways that make them look almost like auxiliary verbs, but not quite, and at the same time they retain their original content meaning. "Go" is one; "try" is another. Diachronically, what's probably going on here is that the verbs in question are in the process of becoming auxiliary verbs, but haven't gotten very far. In other cases the syntax might be influenced by other languages. I think I've heard arguments that some of the "go" forms are due to Yiddish or (more likely) German influence. Chomskyan linguists, though, are mostly concerned with synchronic analysis, and so they've devoted a lot of time and effort to figuring out exactly how these forms work syntactically in the language as it is spoken now. Like I said before, though, I'm not very familiar with that work.
76: Ben wanted there to be parallel structures between the command (go fuck yourself) and the declarative after the fact (*he went fucked himself). You could say he went and fucked himself or he went to fuck himself.
what about other ways to embed it?
I told him to go fuck himself, so he went to fuck himself ...
does that seem like a sentence you could say? I feel unhappy with it but am not sure why
I was delighted when in actually existing life I heard someone who doesn't cook say that she only bought vegetables that don't need cooked.
"Need" + past participle sounds like a Midland feature, from the places mentioned so far.
I always understood the "needs washed" construction as just a dropping of "to be", and neb's link in 73 doesn't really convince me otherwise. The difficult thing is teasing out the rules for when "to be" can be dropped and when it can't.
84: it's not confusion, it's purposefully driven tangents by neb in order to win the conversation.
I stick with my claim that "washed" in "needs washed" is not a verb, and so "the window needs washed" is not an example of multiple tensed verbs strung together, and so this explanation of why the sentences in the second part of the post don't work.
I should have mentioned in 84 that it's possible the diachronic change goes in the other direction, which would make the current forms relics. That would probably be apparent from historical documents, however, and I'm not aware that it is.
"Need" + past participle sounds like a Midland feature, from the places mentioned so far.
Yeah, that's what the article suggests as well. Apparently it's a normal construction in Scots.
it's purposefully driven tangents by neb in order to win the conversation.
So rude. SO rude.
My attention is magpie-like, that's all. If needs + part participle is a tangent (reasonable supposition!), I'm not pursuing it to "win" the conversation. Sheesh.
it's not confusion, it's purposefully driven tangents by neb in order to win the conversation.
No, he's been fine. I was referring to some of the people upthread who really didn't seem to understand what he was talking about.
I stick with my claim that "washed" in "needs washed" is not a verb, and so "the window needs washed" is not an example of multiple tensed verbs strung together, and so this explanation of why the sentences in the second part of the post don't work.
Yes, it's a past participle, which is derived from a verb but generally functions as a noun.
"He needs to get it the fuck done" sounds just fine. But how would I use "the fuck" to intensify a needs washed sentence?
Also, Git-R-Done just sounds real country to me. Aint nobody where I grew up would talk that way.
88- if the to be is elided and that's all, then you should be able to add agents and other clauses to the end of the sentence. It'd be fine to say "the window needs to be washed by a professional", but (the impression I'm getting is) this doesn't work with this construction.
"X needs pastparticpled" would be a perfectly normal locution in my idiolect, fwiw.
"The floor needs washed"
"The potatoes need peeled", etc.
On the other hand, constructions like "the floor needs washing" sound like Anglicisms to me. It'd always be "to be washed" or just "washed" for me.
So rude. SO rude.
so, we'll just call it even, then?
83: Grumpy? Sounds like someone needs conjoined.
"He needs to get it the fuck done" sounds just fine. But how would I use "the fuck" to intensify a needs washed sentence?
Compare apples to apples. Would you say "the dishes need to be the fuck cleaned"? I wouldn't.
99: I'd say "go do the fucking dishes, please" to someone else.
42: Obi-Wan Kenobi Rap Replinger . . . Now that's a name I've not heard in a long, long time.
Seriously, like, thirty years. Wow.
95: The internet provides examples of people saying things like that, for example, someone talking about her dog: "We have introduced her to tons of strangers and she always wants held by them." But for all I know they're typos!
Sounds like someone needs conjoined.
Who doesn't?
Murray, Simon and Frazer seem to think that these constructions (need/want/etc. + pp) haven't received much "formal linguistic attention".
Your teeth probably need cleaned by the dentist.
No, "to be the fuck cleaned" sounds wrong, but "to be washed the the fuck up" sounds OK, if a bit recherche. "put the fuck away" sounds completely natural. Maybe "needs cleaned the fuck up" would be OK.
Knowing that this is legit (an adjective that it seems kids are using pretty indiscriminately nowadays) in Scotland is probably the way to proceed. Unfortunately, nothing's going to take me to Scotland anytime soon.
102: That's grammatical, I think. But as I said above, "ned needs taught a lesson" isn't. So adverbial phrases like "by them" seem OK but objects don't.
ttaM, are there similar restrictions in your idiolect? I guess the geographic distribution makes Scots influence on Appalachian dialect look like the likely source for this in the US.
I need taught a lesson n'at by yinz anymore.
But how would I use "the fuck" to intensify a needs washed sentence?
That nasty-ass dish needs to be washed the fuck off.
107: I find the following at a weird website warning against completing the Census: "NOT participating will have you marked as a dissenter or combatant, a troublemaker, that needs taught a lesson and re-educated."
Needs taught a lesson and re-educated!
Murray, Simon and Frazer seem to think that these constructions (need/want/etc. + pp) haven't received much "formal linguistic attention".
The ones with pp probably haven't. Some similar types of constructions that are grammatical in Standard English certainly have.
Needs taught a lesson and re-educated!
I should say so, because it clearly didn't take the first time.
Japanese has a similar construction, but it's more like "did and" rather than "went and". Like "went and", it's not exactly necessary, but once learned it finds its way into your speech often.
||
Also, I have introduced my daughters to the work of Daniil Kharms, much to their delight.
|>
110 is interesting. Maybe I was too quick to judge it as ungrammatical. It doesn't sound like something I'd ever say. I'll try to listen for it.
Surely ttaM and I aren't the only native "needs Xed" speakers here.
Cala may have been, but aside from an unexpected reäppearance the other day she's flown the coop.
115: I find myself using it, but it's not in my native idiolect. I think I picked it up along with positive 'anymore' from a friend from Montana long ago.
I thought so, but I guess I was wrong.
There is an ad I often see that makes me grit my teeth, although I can't explain what the grammatical violation is.
"____ & ______: Aggressive Lawyers That Get Results," is the tag line. I always want to change it to "who" but for all I know I'm actually wrong.
On the other hand, constructions like "the floor needs washing" sound like Anglicisms to me. It'd always be "to be washed" or just "washed" for me.
Because it's "the floor wants washing".
113: This is nice:
The poet often professed his extreme abhorrence of children and pets, as well as old people; his career as a children's writer notwithstanding.
(From wikipedia, so it may or may not be true; it certainly has some grammatical-type issues.)
Witt's punctiliousness is evident in the different number of underscores she used for the aggressive lawyers' names in 120.
Wasn't he forced to write for children as a by the oppressive soviet regime?
Punctility, or Punctilosity?
(which means something completely different)
123: Holy Toledo, neb, you're right. It was totally unconscious, I swear.
He was forced to write for children as a Pünktlichkeit?
I kinda like: " Aggressive Lawyers What Get Results."
124: Yes. Mayakovsky too, I think; I'll look into it further if someone with JSTOR access would be so kind as to send me this article.
I always want to change it to "who" but for all I know I'm actually wrong.
"Who" is distinguished from "what" by referring only to animate nouns, which is a grammatical category that otherwise doesn't really exist in English. Since it does exist in this particular context, though, it sounds more natural, even though "that" is equally grammatical in a narrow sense.
It should be "Aggressive Lawyers, That Get Results,".
Send me your reading response by tomorrow morning.
OK, Megan's pretending to be a Brit and neb is trying to make my head explode. Thanks for taking me seriously, teo.
113: You mean like shite iku? I learned that late - I'm much more comfortable with shite kuru, "come and [do] - but I had the impression that grammatical form had much more to do with time than with location, especially when it's in the nonpast tense, where "going forward" is a fairly accurate if awkward translation.
I have a crush on Mayakovsky -- or rather on a particular pic of him with a shaved head, torn sweater, and black boots. A guy with the office next to a friend of mine had a poster of it, and I remarked "hubba hubba" and he said, "He was my uncle." (Possibly great uncle?)
79: That construction shows up in, like, Dowland songs, doesn't it? Lending credence to the (somewhat discredited, I think?) linguistic folk wisdom about Elizabethan linguistic relics in certain parts of the south where geography has led to a degree of linguistic isolation. Well, anyway, until the age of television, or the age in which one might graduate high school without knowing about the civil rights movement.
In other news, this is the most exciting thread ever, where "ever"=my two weeks mostly lurking here.
It certainly shows up in plenty of Childe ballads.
138: No, I mean like (nantoka)te shite, which kind of conveys the "up and" meaning. The shite iku construction ga wasurete shichatta.
84: certainly one can easily think of such idioms in Yiddish. Geh kaken in yam, geh weiss (familiar to many people with grandparents, either spoken aloud and sounding like "gay vice" or half-translated to "go know.") But another example--not the warmest of sentiments, again--springs easily to mind from Italian.
"Aggresive Lawyers, That. Get Results!"
Surely, Mister Smearcase has been around more than two weeks. I recall making a mental note that Misters Smearcase and Blandings were two different commenters, and that must have been more than two weeks ago, right?
142: Weird, I guess I never properly learned that formulation. Assuming you mean -te the verb suffix, not tte the slangy equivalent of to.
Haven't read all the comments yet, but I'll still give my two cents. I think the problem is more that the sentences aren't exactly commands that enable compliance. If you take a similar example, but where compliance is possible: "go read a book or something!" It is perfectly possible to answer, by way of indicating compliance: "I did, I went and read a book, just like you told me to!"
I don't think the same thing is going on with "go" in all of these examples. "Go tell it on the mountain" is a straightforward request/command to change location, presumably not made from on the mountain. "Go fuck yourself" is a little more complicated. I'm not sure an actual suggestion of movement is happening there, and as a result, when you put it in declarative mode/past tense, "went and" sounds like another idiomatic/non-literal use. "He went and [verb]ed" has the colloquial usage, not connoting movement, rather like "up and", that's affective, I guess indicating surprise at what happened.
So in most cases, where "go" is not some kind of emphatic/pejorative particile, "go [imperative]" --> "he went and [declaratived]" really requires no asterisk of shame.
145
You're probably right, maybe a month or more. Go figure. He went and figured.
On the "go + ______" thing, Spanish has an interesting thing. In addition to using a similar-to-English contstruction of "Ir + a + [infinitive]", there's a less frequently used construction of "Ir + a + [gerund]", which is used to convey that an action took place over the course of some amount of time.
Hence, el árbol iba creciendo, poco a poco means soemthing like "the tree grew, little by little, over the years" with "over the years" being implied by the construction itself.
All of which seems tangential to the OP, but I've long wished to popularize a similar construction in English. For, wouldn't it be lovely to say "the tree went growing, little by little"? It would
146: Actually, now that I think about it, I'm misremembering. It's not -te shite, but -te shimau.
Oh, Microsoft. Spell-check just suggested correcting "disclosable" (ugly, yes, but not all that bad by lawyer standards) to "disc losable".
Caught myself this morning saying "didn't used to be able to." I blame Texas.
I say that. What would be preferable? "Didn't use to be able to"? Surely not.
"disc losable"
Right. Like when you get a new computer and want to install the old printer but you can't find the software that came with it but that's okay because the printer manufacturer makes the drivers freely available via the support section of their website. That's a disc-losable printer.
Any non-standardness in "didn't used to" reminds me of that of double modals though I guess neither part is exactly a modal auxiliary. They're common in southern speech ("might could" and "might should") but this variant is really, really common, hardly a regionalism. I guess the totally standard version would just be "I wasn't able to" but it lacks some of the tensic* nuance.
*"tensic" doesn't seem to mean "relating to verb tense" but I think it should.
Also aspectual nuance, no? Sticking with the positive, to me, "I used to be able to" differs from "I was able to" in that the former implies that I am not currently able to whereas the latter doesn't (necessarily, anyway), and I would use the latter to describe specific instances of ability whereas the former is more general, e.g. "I was able to see her (I looked through the window and there she was)" vs. "I used to be able to see her (whenever I wanted, by looking through the window)".
So, "I didn't used to be able to see her (before I got this powerful telescope)", but "I wasn't able to see her (the blinds were shut)".
Of course you could use "I wasn't able to see her" for the former sense too, if you said something like "... in those days", I guess, but I don't think you could use "I didn't used to be able to see her" in the latter sense.
Please, no adverse inferences from my voyeuristic example sentences.
"I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too."
—Mitch Hedberg
"I got an ant farm … them fuckers didn't grow shit."
—Mitch Hedberg
Kharms. Mayakovsky. Too threateningly handsome for Stalin to let them live.
I didn't used to not comment.
These days I don't, 'cept when I do.
I thought I had a clever example of how one of the usages of "to go" at the top of the thread was analogous to some colloquial usages of the Russian verb "делать" [to do], but the point escapes me.
As long as we're thinking about the verb "to go" in spirituals, how about "go down Moses, way down in Egypt land" and "Paul and Silas, bound in jail, had no money for to go their bail". In the first example, "go down" seems like a pretty straightforward imperative to motion: "convey yourself deep into Egypt", with the sense that the length and severity of the journey is not merely measured in miles, but in Moses putting himself in jeopardy, while pursuing a seemingly unattainable end. In the other example "to go [someone's] bail" seems like a fairly arbitrary idiom for the act of paying out bail money, except that, presumably, some actual journey to the courthouse or jail or bail bondsman is contemplated.
And of course, you can say "I went his bail", idiomatically.
One can "go down on" someone. One can also "be down on" someone. I'd say it's pretty unlikely, however, that one would "go down" on someone he or she "was down on".
151: Ah, of course.
There's a lot of fun to be had with Japanese auxiliary and compound verbs - especially the suffix -yagaru, vaguely like the adverbial "fucking," and -makuru, meaning "with reckless abandon."
That's one of those classic Rodchenko portraits, iirc.
Of course Stalin was a handsome bastard himself : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Stalin_1902.jpg
157
"Aspectual" is much better. Several Slavic languages are disappointed in me right now.
171: Damn. I could see Jason Schwartzman playing a young Stalin.
115: Surely ttaM and I aren't the only native "needs Xed" speakers here.
I slip into it from time to time since I interact with many native speakers, but I did not grow up with it* despite being a mere 2 hours up the road.
A new word for me from the wiki article on "Pittsburgh English" (which suggests the Scots-Irish influence for "needs/wants/likes Xed), Perhaps the only feature whose distribution is restricted almost exclusively to the Pittsburgh metropolitan area is /aw/ monophthongization. What is the name for the linguistic process which creates a word like that?
*An ugly one I did grow up with is the "positive" use of anymore. "I still use 'anymore' incorrectly anymore."
An ugly one I did grow up with is the "positive" use of anymore
I think this is also a Midland trait in origin, but it's much more widespread now.
What's ugly about positive "anymore"? I like it.
177: In my experience, not pleasing to the ears of East Coasters, in particular my wife and my mother-in-law (who was an NYC public schools English teacher).
"I got an ant farm ... them fuckers didn't grow shit."
Clearly he got the wrong ants. Many species farm fungus.
Or rather an abstract for an interesting-looking paper.
Huh. I think of positive "anymore" as a NYC thing, as that's where I seem to hear it most frequently. So I'm just, what, standing near large groups of midwesterners who happen to be in NYC for the day? I'm not sure I understand where it's common.
I use the positive "anymore", but I have no idea where I picked it up.
No regional insight, but I tend to think of positive "anymore" as one of those plebian innovations like "the reason is, is because" that you might see anywhere.
It's found pretty much everywhere, I think (I associate it mostly with some of my relatives on my dad's side who use it a lot). I don't know that there's been a whole lot of research on it, but there has been some. It's interesting to linguists because it has important implications for some syntactic theories. Like I said above, I think it's a Midland feature originally, but I wouldn't swear to that. I definitely don't associate it with the Northeast; I don't recall ever hearing it around here, but I've heard it a lot in the West.
By the way, "Midland" ≠ "Midwest"; there's some overlap, but the dialect areas of American English don't really correspond to the commonly understood regions.
Wikipedia has a pretty good discussion of American dialects that backs me up on the Midland origin of positive anymore.
By the way, "Midland" ≠ "Midwest"; there's some overlap, but the dialect areas of American English don't really correspond to the commonly understood regions.
Thanks for the clarification. I kind of hesitated when I typed that and just went with it.
Because you don't see regions.
??? I associate positive anymore (I assume this means something like "the traffic is crazy in savannah anymore") with my exceedingly country-fried step-mom, who is from metter, GA.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone use the positive anymore in the way you guys are describing. And that's after living in a few different regions of the country. I'm still not grasping how exactly its supposed to be used.
Positive "anymore" means "nowadays" or "lately", basically. Alameida's example is strictly correct.
True fact, I was talking about positive "anymore" on a date tonight and seem not to have scared of the datee.
seem not to have scared of the datee.
Neb is a little lax anymore.
Only skimmed the thread, so this might have been said before, but my theory is that its a pragmatic thing. When you utter a bare imperative "φ" you might distinguish two things that can happen. One (call it "satisfaction of the imperative") where the commandee for whatever reason φs and a further level (call it "compliance with the imperative") where the commandee φs because of a consciousness that they've been commanded.
Now, if you wanted to insult someone by implying that they are your bitch, you might want to communicate that you're telling them not just to φ but to φ because you are telling them. You do this by saying "Go φ". Whereas "Go φ" might originally have been derived from "Go and φ" ("Go, and sin no more"), where what you're communicating is that the commandee should satisfy the imperative "Go and φ", within the syncopated form "Go φ" the "Go" now functions to communicate that you are being directed to comply with the imperative "φ". But what "He went and φed" reports is that the commandee satisfied "Go and φ" and not that he complied with "φ". Hence the feeling that "He went and φed" is somehow inadequate.
Anyone disagrees with me, they can go fuck themselves.
What makes Neb the dater and his interlocutor the datee?
Each is the datee to the other and the dater to him or herself.
Couldn't both be co-daters?
Co-dating in the relevant sense is precisely the situation taht obtains when each dater is a datee to the other.
(An irrelevant sense obtains between the members of the two pairs of people not on a date with each other on a double date.)
Isn't this the ideal opportunity to say "the datrix"?
