>> I recently noticed the use of 'plenty' as an adverb, as in "our troops
>> are plenty brave" (GWB). Don't know if that is general American E or
>> just a Bushism.
John Sowa replied:
> George W. is an interesting example of the issues involved in
> characterizing a dialect...His brother Jeb, by contrast,
> talks like a normal, educated human being.
The claim apparently being that George Bush -- by using "plenty ADJ" -- does not speak like a "normal, educated human being".
Actually, "plenty ADJ" and "plenty N" are quite common in spoken American English, by people of all backgrounds. In looking through a 300+ million word corpus of spoken American English, I found 240 cases of the construction (see http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu/plenty.txt <http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu/plenty.txt> ), all of them by people other than GW Bush. Several of these are by TV reporters and commentators.
In addition, the construction goes back to the 1800s:
1 1842 J. AITON: Domest. Econ. A leaden collar for the stick, with the hole in the collar plenty large enough.
2 1884 H. COLLINGWOOD: Under Meteor Flag They're plenty large enough.
Finally, it also appears in British English. You can search for " plenty [aj0] " via the VIEW interface to the BNC (http://view.byu.edu <http://view.byu.edu> ) and you'll find plenty large, plenty big, plenty warm, plenty usable, etc, etc.
So to the degree that Bush does not speak like a "normal, educated human being", he's in good company -- historically, dialectally, and in terms of a 200+ other speakers in the corpus referred to above.
Finally, it was suggested that:
> he sounds as if he's listening to an internal
> tape in one dialect and trying to do a simultaneous translation
> to another. (Some people have suggested that it's not a tape,
> but an actual radio transmission from Karl Rove.)
Add to the presidential advisors the name of James Carville (one of the main advisors to Bill Clinton), who is apparently also not a "normal, educated human being", as evidenced by his use of "plenty ADJ":
[148] CF5758.TXT(261): CARVILLE: I'm make plenty sense.
Best,
Mark Davies
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Mark Davies
Professor of (Corpus) Linguistics
Brigham Young University
(phone) 801-422-9168 / (fax) 801-422-0906
http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu <https://webmail.byu.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu/>
** Corpus design and use // Linguistic databases **
** Historical linguistics // Language variation **
** English, Spanish, and Portuguese **
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