Chapter published in:
Processes of Change: Studies in Late Modern and Present-Day EnglishEdited by Sandra Jansen and Lucia Siebers
[Studies in Language Variation 21] 2019
► pp. 159–182
Chapter 9. Attitudes to flat adverbs and English usage advice
Widespread as they are in non-standard and informal varieties of English, flat or suffixless adverbs are subject to prescriptive criticism when appearing in standard English. In the present study we repeated the survey by Mittins et al. (1970) in Attitudes to English Usage to investigate whether the acceptability of flat adverbs has changed since the late 1960s. Our findings suggest that acceptability has grown over the past fifty years, with flat adverbs losing their status of a usage problem. The analysis of the Hyper Usage Guide of English database suggests the same. Interestingly, we identified a new usage problem related to the usage of adverbs, one primarily associated with American English, the dual-pair adverb, thus/thusly.
Keywords: acceptability survey, thusly, flat adverbs, American English, attitudes to usage, usage problems, British English, HUGE database, usage guides
Published online: 13 August 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.21.09luk
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.21.09luk
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Cited by
Cited by other publications
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid
2020. Of greengrocers, sports commentators, estate agents and television presenters: who’s in a usage guide and why.
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development ► pp. 1 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 june 2020. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.