NewHopeR
Senior Member
- Joined
- Nov 6, 2009
- Member Type
- Student or Learner
- Native Language
- Chinese
- Home Country
- China
- Current Location
- China
Context:
In this study, we describe a current change in progress involving a previously unstudied
syntactic variable. The variable under study is the presence of post-adjectival (of) in degree
constructions such as “It’s not that big (of) a deal”. Our initial impressionistic and corpus
observations showed that such constructions occur frequently across discursive domains in
American English. A corpus search of news media from the 1940s to the present day revealed a
steady increase in (of) usage, particularly in the past two decades. People’s intuitions about the
relative acceptability of the feature also suggest its significance as a sociolinguistic variable.
In this study, we describe a current change in progress involving a previously unstudied
syntactic variable. The variable under study is the presence of post-adjectival (of) in degree
constructions such as “It’s not that big (of) a deal”. Our initial impressionistic and corpus
observations showed that such constructions occur frequently across discursive domains in
American English. A corpus search of news media from the 1940s to the present day revealed a
steady increase in (of) usage, particularly in the past two decades. People’s intuitions about the
relative acceptability of the feature also suggest its significance as a sociolinguistic variable.
