Chapter published in:
Processes of Change: Studies in Late Modern and Present-Day English
Edited by Sandra Jansen and Lucia Siebers
[Studies in Language Variation 21] 2019
► pp. 159–182

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: flat adverbs, , usage problems, British English, American English, attitudes to usage, usage guides, acceptability survey, HUGE database
Published online: 13 August 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.21.09luk
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