The adverb anymore can occur at the end of a negative clause in all dialects of American English. Some American English dialects also allow anymore in a broader range of clause types and clausal positions, and in non-negative polarity clauses. These “positive” forms of anymore have been studied many times since first being noted in Malone (1931).
However, positive-anymore poses challenges to researchers. In particular, it occurs infrequently in conversational speech, making it difficult to report quantitative data based on productions. Researchers have therefore often studied positive-anymore by eliciting grammaticality judgments in surveys (e.g., Youmans 1986; Murray 1993). But these same studies report that people fail to recognize positive-anymore in their own speech, rendering findings problematic.
The huge volume of speech-like text on Twitter offers a potential workaround to the problem of low-frequency grammatical variables like positive-anymore. The present study reports data from more than 80,000 tweets containing the word anymore that were collected over one month from areas around five Midland cities and three non-Midland cities. Tweets were coded for the type of polarity trigger licensing anymore and for the position of anymore within a clause.
Results confirm positive-anymore as a distinctive feature of the American Midland. Production data also suggest that three polarity triggers--comparatives, quantifiers, and incorporated negative adjectives--might foster transitions from negative-anymore grammars to positive-anymore grammars.
In addition to providing new and needed data based on productions of positive-anymore, this presentation also considers ethical and legal issues relevant to building sociolinguistic corpora from Twitter. Specifically, it examines requirements in the Twitter license regarding location data connected with tweets, and raises concerns over protecting the anonymity of Twitter users who, according to Twitter policies, may be as young as 13.
References
Malone, Kemp. 1931. Any more in the affirmative. American Speech 6(6). 460.
Murray, Thomas E. 1991. Positive anymore in the Midwest. In Timothy C. Frazer, Heartland English: Variation and transition in the American Midwest, 173-186. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Youmans, Gilbert. 1986. Any more on anymore? Evidence from a Missouri dialect survey. American Speech 61(1). 61-75.
