Thanks for the OED info (alas, I currently am deprived of my OED access) and for the link to the Jan Freeman article, which I particularly enjoyed.

Most of my students (native speakers of English and non-native speakers) turn to much slimmer dictionaries that sometimes lack the kind of information that the OED would be able to clarify.

I think the OED's qualifier "now" is in reference to the efforts in the past couple of centuries to prescribe consistency onto English's features, such as the adverb formation process. So many school teachers drilled the -ly version as correct that "now" the bob-tailed version is considered colloquial.

I suppose that this could be the case for a lot of -ly adverbs; our language instincts don't need the suffix, but when we drop it, there's that small 19th century grammarian schoolteacher in our head who says, "Well, now, that's just not right."

Also, interesting corpus results! You do great corpus-based research!

John Alexander

On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 6:49 AM, Brett Reynolds <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
On 14-May-09, at 9:34 PM, John Alexander wrote:

As far as I know, "quickly" has been the adverb form and "quick" the adjective form for some time now. Dictionaries often list "quick" as a colloquial adverb only and not a formal one.

The OED notes "Now usually considered less formal than quickly, and found chiefly in informal or colloquial contexts." The now at the beginning of that sentence is of interest. The entry has quotations for quick as an adverb from 1300 until the present day with everything in between, and with both formal and informal examples.

In other words, this is not a change, but a continuation, though perhaps we are currently on the ebb of an -ly-ful wave. The Corpus of Current American English shows a slight decline in -ly adverb frequency from 1990-2008 with 11,515 instances per million words in 1990-1994, 11, 291 in '95-'99, 11,146 in 200-2004, and 11,074 in 2005-2008 where, over the same period, all adverb actually increased in frequency from 35,072 PMW to 35,373.

The Time Corpus shows the same overall increase in adverb use, but for -ly adverbs, it shows a gradual increase from the 1920s with a peak in 1970s followed by a drop off, today's levels being about the same as they were a century ago.

Also, check out Jan Freeman's "The Word" column from Sept 17, 2006.

Best,
Brett

-----------------------
Brett Reynolds
English Language Centre
Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
Toronto, Ontario, Canada




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