Cover not available
Article published In:
Diachronica
Vol. 35:1 (2018) ► pp.107–143

Near done; awful stable; really changing

The suffixless adverb in dialects of the UK

| University of Toronto
This paper examines adverb formation with -ly, e.g., slow/slowly, and uses a large archive of synchronic dialects to uncover the current state and historical trajectory of this process. The results reveal that English adverbs are a variegated system. The intensifying adverb really is a frequent form while sentential adverbs appear to be a newer layer in the system. In contrast, manner adverbs are constrained by the semantic interpretation of the adverb as abstract or concrete. These results expose the complexity of the English adverb system and demonstrate that adverb formation is an ideal site for uncovering historical processes in synchronic data.
Keywords: morphological variation, British dialects, variation and change, -ly adverbs, adverb formation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Historical perspective
  • 3.Constraints on adverb form
    • 3.1Adverb function
    • 3.2Semantics of manner adverbs
    • 3.3Syntactic position
    • 3.4Summary
  • 4.Synchronic perspective – UK
  • 5.The present study
  • 6.Data and methods
    • 6.1Circumscribing the variable context
    • 6.2Exceptional distributions
  • 7.Results
    • 7.1Distributional analysis
    • 7.2Semantics of manner adverbs
    • 7.3Syntactic position
    • 7.4Mixed effects modelling
    • 7.5Conditional inference tree
  • 8.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 April 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.16027.tag
References (85)
References
[Boswell] Pottle, Fred. 1762. Boswell’s London journal 1762–1763. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Abbott, Edwin Abbott. 1879. A Shakespearian grammar. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Alford, Henry. 1864. A plea for the Queen’s English: Stray notes on speaking and spelling. London: Strahan.Google Scholar
Anthony, Lawrence. 2009. ANT CONC 3.1.0. A freeware concordance program for Windows. [URL] (13 December, 2017).
Anttila, Raimo. 1989. Historical and comparative linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baayen, Harald, Doug Davidson & Douglas Bates. 2008. Mixed-effect modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language 591. 390–412. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad & Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
Carroll, Ruth. 2008. Historical English phraseology and the extender tag. Selim 151. 7–37.Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny. 1982. Variation in an English dialect: A sociolinguistic study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan & Merja Kytö. 2010. Early Modern English dialogues: Spoken interaction as writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Donner, Morton. 1991. Adverb form in Middle English. English Studies 721. 1–11. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Draat, P. Fijn van. 1910. Rhythm in English prose. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.Google Scholar
Emma, Ronald David. 1964. Milton’s grammar. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Filppula, Markku. 2008. Irish English: Morphology and syntax. In Bernd Kortmann & Clive Upston (eds.), Varieties of English, 1: The British Isles, 328–359. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Görlach, Manfred. 1991. Colonial lag? The alleged conservative character of American English and other ‘colonial’ varieties. In Manfred Görlach (ed.), Englishes: Studies in varieties of English 1984–1988, 90–107. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grant, William. & David Murison (eds.). 1931–1976. The Scottish national dictionary. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.Google Scholar
Greenough, James Bradstreet & George Lyman Kittredge. 1901. Words and their ways in English speech. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Hedevind, Bertil. 1967. The dialect of Dentdale in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
Hock, Hans Henrich. 1986. Principles of historical linguistics. Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hopper, Paul J. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 1993. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hughes, Arthur & Peter Trudgill. 1979. English accents and dialects: An introduction to social and regional varieties of British English. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Ito, Rika & Sali A. Tagliamonte. 2003. Well weird, right dodgy, very strange, really cool: Layering and recycling in English intensifiers. Language in Society 32(2). 257–279. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jespersen, Otto H. 1961. A modern English grammar on historical principles, part 6: Morphology. London: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
1964. Essentials of English grammar. Alabama: University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony S. 1989. Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change 1(3). 199–244. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. 1971. Some principles of linguistic methodology. Language in Society 1(1). 97–120. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1985. Intensity. In Deborah Schiffrin (ed.), Meaning, form and use in context: Linguistic applications, 43–70. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
. 2001. Principles of linguistic change, vol. 2: Social factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Leeds, Winifred. 1974. Herfordshire speech: The south-west midland dialect as spoken in Herefordshire and its environs. Upton Crews: M. Spurway.Google Scholar
Liddle, Roy. 1999. A comparative study of the dual-form adverb lexemes quick and slow . Växjö, Sweden: Växjö University.Google Scholar
Lowth, Robert. 1762/1775. A short introduction to English grammar. London: Printed by J. Hughs for A. Millar and J. Dodsley.Google Scholar
Luick, Karl. 1882. Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache. Kassel: Wgand.: Kromayer, Johannes. 1986 [1618].Google Scholar
Macafee, Caroline. 2001. Lowland sources of Ulster Scots. In John Kirk & Donall Ó Baoill (eds.), Languages links: The languages of Scotland and Ireland, 1211. Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona.Google Scholar
Macaulay, Ronald K. S. 1995. The adverbs of authority. English World-Wide 16(1). 37–60. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Matthews, William. 1938. Cockney past and present: A short history of the dialect of London. London: George Routledge & Sons.Google Scholar
Mencken, Henry Louis. 1961. The American language: Supplement II. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
. 1962. The American language. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Mustanoja, Tauno F. 1960. A Middle English syntax. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu. 1991. But, only, just: Focusing adverbial change in Modern English 1500–1900. Helsinki: Société Neophilologique.Google Scholar
. 1994a. Aspects of adverbial change in Early Modern English. In Dieter Kastovsky (ed.), Studies in Early Modern English, 243–259. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1994b. Diachronic issues in English adverb derivation. In Udo Fries, Gunnel Tottie & Peter Schneider (eds.), Creating and using English language corpora: Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on English Language on Computerized Corpora, Zürich 1993, 139–147. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
. 1997. The processes of adverb derivation in Late Middle and Early Modern English. In Matti Rissanen, Merja Kytö & Kirsi Heikkonen (eds.), Grammaticalization at work: Studies of long term developments in English, 145–189. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Opdahl, Lise. 2000a. LY or zero suffix? A study in variation of dual-form adverbs in present-day English, vol. 21. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
. 2000b. LY or zero suffix? A study in variation of dual-form adverbs in present-day English, vol. 11. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Partridge, Astly Cooper. 1969. Tudor to Augustan English: A study in syntax and style from Caxton to Johnson. London: André Deutsch.Google Scholar
Peters, Hans. 1992. English boosters: Some synchronic and diachronic aspects. In Günter Kellermann & Michael D. Morrissey (eds.), Diachrony within synchrony: Language history and cognition: Papers from the International Symposium at the University of Duisburg, 26–28 March 1990, 529–545. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
. 1994. Degree adverbs in early modern English. In Dieter Kastovsky (ed.), Studies in Early Modern English, 269–288. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pounder, Amanda. 2001. Adverb marking in German and English: System and standardization. Diachronica 18(3). 301–358. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2004. Hapology in English adverb-formation. In Christian J. Kay, Carole A. Hough & Irené Wotherspoon (eds.), New perspectives in English Historical Linguistics, 193–211. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2007. Norm consciousness and corpus constitution in the study of earlier Modern Germanic languages. In Stephan Elspass, Nils Langer, Wim Vandenbussche & Joachim Scharloth (eds.), Germanic language histories from below (1700–2000), 275–294. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2008. Adverb-marking patterns in Earlier Modern English coordinate constructions. In Marina Dossena, Richard Drury & Maurizio Gott (eds.), English historical linguistics 2006, 183–201. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Poutsma, Hendrik. 1926. A grammar of Late Modern English. Groningen: P. Noordhoff.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1972. A grammar of contemporary English. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffry Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
R Development Core Team. 2007. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. [URL] (13 December, 2017.)
Ramisch, Heinrich. 1989. The variation of English in Guernsey/Channel Islands. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Rice, Wallace. 1927. Go slow – Proceed slowly. American Speech September. 489–491. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rissanen, Matti & Minna Palander-Collin. 1993. Early English in the computer age: Explorations through the Helsinki Corpus. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Robertson, Stuart. 1954. The development of Modern English. Revised by Frederic G. Cassidy. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Ross, Claudia N. 1984. Adverbial change: Implications for a theory of lexical change. In David Testen, Veena Mishra & Joseph Drogo (eds.), Papers from the parasession on lexical semantics, 243–249. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Schibsbye, Knud. 1965. A Modern English grammar. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Schilling-Estes, Natalie & Walt Wolfram. 1999. Alternative models of dialect death: Dissipation vs. contraction. Language 75(3). 486–521. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie & Karin Aigmer. 2007. The semantic field of modal certainty: A corpus-based study of English adverbs. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smith, Jennifer. 2000. Synchrony and diachrony in the evolution of English: Evidence from Scotland. York: University of York dissertation.Google Scholar
Storm, Johan. 1892. Englische Philologie. Leipzig: Reisland.Google Scholar
Strobl, Carolin, James D. Malley & Gerhard Tutz. 2009. An introduction to recursive partitioning: Rationale, application, and characteristics of classification and regression trees, bagging, and Random Forests. Psychological Methods 14(4). 323–348. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Swan, Michael. 1980. Practical English usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Swan, Toril. 1988. The development of sentence adverbs in English. Studia Linguistica 42(1). 1–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1996. Adverbialization and subject-modification in Old English. In Jacek Fisiak & Marcin Krygier (eds.), Advances in English historical linguistics, 453–456. Berlin: Mouton du Gruyter.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. 1997. Obsolescence in the English Perfect? Evidence from Samaná English. American Speech 72(1). 33–68. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2006. Historical change in synchronic perspective: The legacy of British dialects. In Ans van Kemenade & Bettelou Los (eds.), Handbook of the history of English, 477–506. Malden: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008. So different and pretty cool! Recycling intensifiers in Canadian English. Special issue of English Language and Linguistics, Intensifiers, Belén Mendez-Naya (ed.) 12(2). 361–394. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013. Roots of English: Exploring the history of dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A., Mercedes Durham & Jennifer Smith. 2014. Grammaticalization at an early stage: Future ‘be going to’ in conservative British dialects. English Language and Linguistics 18(1). 75–108. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Rika Ito. 2002. Think really different: Continuity and specialization in the English adverbs. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6(2). 236–266. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Jennifer Smith (2018). Obviously undergoing change: Adverbs of evidentiality in the UK and Canada over 100 years. Fourth International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE 4), London, England, August 2018Google Scholar
Tidholm, Hans. 1979. The dialect of Egton in North Yorkshire. Gothenburg: Bokmaskine.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Richard B. Dasher. 2002. Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter J. 1990. The dialects of England. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Uhler, Karl. 1926. Die bedeutungsgleichhheit der altenglischen adjektiva und adverbia mit und ohne -ic (lice). Heidelberg: Winter.Google Scholar
Ungerer, Friedrich. 1988. Syntax der englischen Adverbialen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov & Marvin Herzog. 1968. Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In Winfred P. Lehmann & Yakov Malkiel (eds.), Directions for historical linguistics, 95–188. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt & Natalie Schilling-Estes. 2006. American English. 2nd edn. Malden: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Wyld, Henry Cecil. 1927. A short history of English. London: John Murray.Google Scholar
Zettersten, Arne. 1969. The English of Tristan da Cunha. Lund: Gleerup.Google Scholar