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.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The survey
- 3.Usage of slow/slowly and quicker/more quickly, and of thusly
- 3.1
Slow/slowly and quicker/more quickly
- 3.2
Thusly
- 4.Survey results
- 4.1The respondents
- 4.2Acceptability ratings for quicker, go slow and
thusly
- 4.3Acceptability ranking for go slow, quicker and thusly across
sociolinguistic groups
- 5.Go slow/slowly, quicker/more quickly and thusly in the usage
guides
- 6.The usage guides and the informants
- 7.Conclusion
-
Acknowledgment
-
Notes
-
References
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Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
COLLINS, PETER
2022.
Hypercorrection in English: an intervarietal corpus-based study.
English Language and Linguistics 26:2
► pp. 279 ff.

Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid
2021.
Of greengrocers, sports commentators, estate agents and television presenters: who’s in a usage guide and why.
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 42:9
► pp. 783 ff.

Yáñez-Bouza, Nuria
2022.
Methodological approaches to the study of codification, prescription, and prescriptivism.
Studia Neophilologica 94:3
► pp. 334 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 march 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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