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Part of
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

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: flat adverbs, thusly , usage problems, British English, American English, attitudes to usage, usage guides, acceptability survey, HUGE database
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The survey
  • 3.Usage of slow/slowly and quicker/more quickly, and of thusly
    • 3.1Slow/slowly and quicker/more quickly
    • 3.2Thusly
  • 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
Published online: 13 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.21.09luk
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