Article contents
Flat adverbs: acceptable today?
A further opportunity to contribute material for the Bridging the Unbridgeable project of the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 August 2015
Extract
In February 2015, Catherine Bennett published a piece called “Modern Tribes: the grammar pedant” in The Guardian Online. The article focused on so-called usage problems – instances of divided usage concerning grammar, vocabulary or spelling that many people have strong opinions about. (The previous sentence is a good example of such a usage problem: can you indeed end a sentence with a preposition, for instance?) The article itself was not very interesting in its own right: it dealt with all the “old chestnuts”, like less/fewer, disinterested/uninterested and of course the split infinitive. What was interesting, though, was that within a little over ten hours, 84 comments had come in. In the Bridging the Unbridgeable project, we are interested in new usage problems rather than the ones we have been reading about for around two hundred years. So I scoured the comments with great interest. I've already written about what I found in a post on the Bridging the Unbridgeable blog: there were not many new or any very striking complaints, but what I do find of interest is that no-one mentioned the flat adverb. Does this mean that flat adverbs are no longer considered problematical today?
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015
References
Notes
1 See http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/28/grammar-pedant-modern-tribes-catherine-bennett (accessed 6 May 2015).
3 See the link http://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/usage-polls/: the sentence he did it quicker is part of usage poll 7, and you'd better go slow of usage poll 11.
- 2
- Cited by