Journal of English Linguistics
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Viewpoint -wise: The Spread and Development of a New Type of Adverb
in American and British English
Hans Lindquist
Journal of English Linguistics 2007; 35; 132
DOI: 10.1177/0075424207300619
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http://eng.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/35/2/132
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Viewpoint -wise
The Spread and Development of a New
Type of Adverb in American and
British English
Journal of English Linguistics
Volume 35 Number 2
June 2007 132-156
© 2007 Sage Publications
10.1177/0075424207300619
http://eng.sagepub.com
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
Hans Lindquist
Växjö University, Sweden
In the second half of the twentieth century, a new type of adverb, viewpoint adverbs
formed with the suffix -wise, appeared in English. This article traces the diffusion and
development of viewpoint -wise adverbs using American and British newspaper corpora, the spoken component of the British National Corpus, and the Longman Spoken
American Corpus. It is shown that the adverbs are at least twice as frequent in the spoken corpora as in the written, that they are increasing in both American and British
English, and that the originally American adverb type is now more frequent in British
English. Its spread seems to be motivated by both functional and social factors. In
newspapers, a high proportion occurs in represented speech, and the major domains are
sports, art and entertainment, and “living.” It has extended its range of bases from
nouns to noun phrases and, to some extent, generalized to adjectives and adverbs.
Keywords:
American English; British English; corpus linguistics; domain adverb;
language change; newspaper corpus; suffix; viewpoint adverb; -wise
Introduction
Adverbs formed by means of the suffix -wise have a long history in the language, but
in the past sixty or seventy years a new type of -wise adverbs, viewpoint adverbs, has
appeared. The main adverb types in -wise are illustrated in boldface in (1)-(3).
(1) Cut in half and then in slices crosswise, brush with oil and season, then grill for
five minutes on either side. Alternatively, cut in half lengthwise, brush with oil and
season ([London] Independent [hereafter, IND] 2000).1
(2) His leg took nine years to mend, and he still walks a bit crab-wise (IND 2000).
(3) Football-wise we’ve been very good and in possession we looked strong, but our
problem is that we’re not performing well without the ball (IND 2000).
Author’s Note: I would like to thank Magnus Levin and Carita Paradis for useful comments on an earlier version of this article, Maria Fohlin for drawing my attention to the work of Claude Guimier, and the
editors and two anonymous reviewers for many constructive suggestions.
132
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Lindquist / The Spread and Development of a New Adverb Type 133
In example (1), the adverb specifies the dimension or direction of an action; in (2),
the manner in which the action is carried out; and in (3), the point of view from
which the statement is made. The adverbs in (1) and (2) are thus manner adverbs,2
whereas the adverb in (3), the new type, is a viewpoint adverb. The first attestation
in the Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter, OED) of the new use, positionwise, is
American, from 1942 (cf. OED s.v. wise II.3bii). Typical present-day examples
include budget-wise, career-wise, crimewise, foodwise, health wise, market-wise,
percentage-wise, and style-wise (all New York Times [hereafter, NYT] 2000).
In the 1960s, a spate of publications commented on this new use (for an early discussion, see Houghton 1968). These commentators generally agreed that the phenomenon is an American innovation, and it is a common view that it has remained an
American specialty:
Viewpoint subjuncts can also be formed from nouns by the addition of the suffix -wise
(especially in AmE [American English]), though these are considered informal. (Quirk
et al. 1985, 568)
[A] recent use of -wise, with the sense ‘as regards’, which yields numerous nonceforms, largely restricted to informal style, and more common in AmE than in BrE
[British English]. (Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 567)
Lenker (2002, 158) reported that commentators from the 1960s and up to the
1990s call the use of viewpoint adverbs in -wise a “gimmick,” a “fad,” or “trendy jargon.” In 1960, it is made fun of in Billy Wilder’s motion picture The Apartment, as
mentioned in passing in (4), which is from a movie column forty years later in the
New York Times (2000).3
(4) Mr. Kirkeby, whose habit of using the suffix -wise—So you hit the jackpot, eh kid?
I mean, Kubelik-wise?—is caught by the impressionable Baxter as easily as the
cold he catches in Central Park (NYT 2000).
Viewpoint adverbs in -wise have become a favorite target for language columnists, and
a quick search on the World Wide Web shows that the use of these adverbs is discouraged in strong words on a number of more or less academic sites giving advice on writing and usage. Some serious commentators have conceded, however, that they can be
“eminently useful” (Pulgram 1968, 382) and that “careerwise is much quicker than ‘in
relation to my career’ and moneywise more direct than ‘as far as money is concerned’”
(Howard 1993, 411, quoted by Lenker 2002, 158).
Disputed usages that have reached the conscious level of writers and the public
are also often treated in publishers’ style guides. The New York Times Manual
of Style and Usage (Siegal and Connolly 1999, 358) contains the following
guidance:
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134 Journal of English Linguistics
(-)wise. Use this suffix with care. It forms standard compounds like clockwise, lengthwise, otherwise, penny-wise and slantwise. It is also commonly accepted in streetwise
and weather-wise, meaning informed about weather: He was a weather-wise old
mariner. But avoid faddish uses that seem to parody Madison Avenue: Weather-wise, it
was a terrible day.
Note that the adjective suffix -wise, the manner adverb suffix -wise, and the viewpoint
adverb suffix -wise are treated together, and that the latter is dismissed as Madison
Avenue jargon. This piece of advice may have reduced the use of viewpoint adverbs in
-wise in the New York Times to a certain extent but, as will be seen below, far from completely.4
In the present article, I will present data that suggest that viewpoint adverbs in -wise
are not just a fad and that they are now at least as frequent in British English as in
American English, but still to a certain extent typical of spoken language and less formal written registers. Furthermore, I will argue that the -wise suffix is showing signs
of generalization to new types of bases.
Previous Scholarship
The new type of -wise adverbs have been called “viewpoint subjuncts” (Quirk
et al. 1985, 568), “viewpoint adverbs” (Dalton-Puffer and Plag 2000; Yezbick and
Traugott 2005; Cowie 2006), “adverbs de domaine” (Guimier 2001, 2005), “domain
or viewpoint adverbs” (Lenker 2002), and “[adverbs meaning] ‘as regards’”
(Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 567). In a paper on a similar construction, Rickford
et al. (1995) used the term “topic-restricting adverbs.” In the following, I will use
viewpoint adverbs, which seems to be the most established term.
Lenker (2002) dealt especially with the history of -wise adverbs, arguing that viewpoint adverbs in -(ic)ally developed in the nineteenth century as a need for specifying
the domain of utterances arose in scientific discourse, and that similar functional motivations lie behind the rise of viewpoint adverbs in -wise in the twentieth century (171-74).
She also suggested (2002, 176) that viewpoint adverbs in -wise developed historically
through a pattern transfer from likewise and especially otherwise, which she said is
frequently used as “a domain adverb of a more or less vague kind” and often in coordination with a viewpoint adverb, for example in definitions in the OED like etymologically or otherwise (OED s.v. nylon). A search, however, reveals that the example
quoted by Lenker is the only instance of the type of viewpoint adverb + or + otherwise used in the definitions in the entire OED, so this particular claim is not very well
founded. Lenker used the ICAME CD-ROM5 plus the Independent, the Guardian, and
the Observer on CD-ROM as data and claimed (2002, 175) that her corpus examples
“almost exclusively relate to . . . technical registers,” in which she included science and
art, and apparently also business, trade, and industry, domains that are often mentioned
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Lindquist / The Spread and Development of a New Adverb Type 135
in the early American commentaries on the construction (cf. Houghton 1968, 210).
Lenker thus saw viewpoint adverbs in -wise as motivated by specific functions in
certain genres.
The aim of Cowie (2006) is to “explain the distribution of the . . . construction
across the registers of the BNC [British National Corpus] with reference to its pragmatic function.” Cowie doubted Lenker’s hypothesis about the origin of viewpoint
-wise because rather few examples of -wise adverbs are found in scientific registers
today. Cowie instead proposed to explain the rise of viewpoint adverbs in -wise by
referring to a number of discourse functions that they can fulfill. She mentioned four
such functions: (1) providing a focus for a clause (in some registers especially as a
base for evaluation), (2) organizing discourse beyond the clause level, (3) creating
an economical and impersonal style, and (4) creating a politeness strategy. The first
function is similar to the domain specification mentioned by Lenker (2002, 171-74),
but on a more mundane level than science and scholarship. The second function,
when for instance the adverb can be used to state in which order different aspects of
a topic will be dealt with, is also mentioned by Guimier (2005, 115-16). The third
function relates to the terseness and a “flavor of authority and officialdom” (Pulgram
1968, 382-83) that have been mentioned by earlier commentators as motivating
forces behind the use of viewpoint adverbs in -wise. For the last function, Cowie
gave examples when the viewpoint adverb in -wise is added directly to a question in
conversation, thus softening and hedging the question by limiting its scope. Guimier
called this retrospective repair (2001, 160) or a posteriori justification of the predication (2005, 113).6
Guimier (2001) drew on the largest data set of all -wise studies to date, more than
2,000 tokens of approximately 550 different types, mainly from the Internet but also
from other sources, and focused on their textual function and syntactic characteristics.
He noted that adverbs in -wise often act as connectors, assuring thematic continuity
and cohesion, and that they are frequently coordinated with other viewpoint adverbs of
various types. In a later study, Guimier (2005) provided a detailed analysis of the
semantic properties of manner and viewpoint adverbs in -wise and their function. For
the viewpoint adverbs, he sees two main types: those that delimit a conceptual domain
for which the predication is valid, as in (5), and those that do not, as in (6).
(5) Concertwise, this is going to be a very hot summer.
(6) Snake-wise, I have a male and a female freckled python and a male Brazilian rainbow boa.
In (5), the predication that it is going to be a very hot summer is true only in regard
to concerts, whereas in (6) the adverb snake-wise does not delimit the conceptual
domain for which the predication is valid in the same manner. For delimiting
adverbs, Guimier noted that they can be prospective or retrospective and that their
roles differ depending on position.
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136 Journal of English Linguistics
As regards register, Cowie (2006, 19-27) found that many of the written examples
in the BNC are from texts aimed at groups of specialists, but not necessarily professionals, like guitarists and guitar collectors, fish-keeping enthusiasts, home machineknitters, and so on. She called these groups “close knit ‘hobby’ communities” and
argued that the texts are involved (in the sense of Chafe 1982 and Biber 1988) and conversational in nature. Yezbick and Traugott (2005, 108-10), in a study in which they
used the Internet accessed through “informal searching on Google” and two corpora
of spoken American English (the Switchboard Corpus from 1992 and the Broadcast
News Corpus from 1997), claimed that the form is now associated with “Internet
style”: “the recent cliticization is favoured in . . . the kind of writing found on the
Internet, and in computer-mediated communication (CMC) generally . . . that is decidedly ‘anti-formal’ and designed to suggest spoken discourse.” They also argued that the
change from manner to viewpoint is an example of subjectification in meaning (along
the lines of Traugott and Dasher 2002, 31).
Plag, Dalton-Puffer, and Baayen (1999) examined the relation between register
variation and derivational morphology in fifteen different suffixes including -wise and
found that “[t]he suffix -wise contrasts with all suffixes mentioned so far in that it is at
least as productive in spoken as in written registers” (1999, 220). In another paper,
Dalton-Puffer and Plag (2000) showed that viewpoint -wise is less frequent but more
productive than manner -wise in the BNC and argued that, morphologically, it is a suffix rather than a part of a compound. As regards morphology, Lenker (2002, 174)
pointed out that the -wise suffix has an advantage over the competitor -(ic)ally in that
it can be added to all kinds of nouns, not only those of Romance origin. Instances in
which words with the -(ic)ally suffix and the -wise suffix are asymmetrically coordinated are not rare and show, as mentioned by Lenker (2002, 164), that their function is
similar. Yezbick and Traugott (2005, 108-10) claimed that there is an increased freedom of-wise to occur with a variety of bases (i.e., generalization) and that it behaves
like a clitic rather than a suffix.
In sum, these previous studies, which notably only marginally refer to each other,
have observed that the originally American usage has spread to British English, that the
adverbs have a number of discourse functions related to the speaker’s subjective evaluation of a proposition, and that morphologically there is a loosening of constraints or generalization so that -wise can be added to a widening range of bases. Finally, a number of
different registers have been proposed as especially -wise prone: technical registers,
including science and art, business, trade, and industry (Lenker 2002); computermediated communication and (youthful) Internet style (Yezbick and Traugott 2005);
and “close knit ‘hobby’ communities” and “pop lore” (Cowie 2006).
Aims
The present study aims to answer the following research questions, which remain
wholly or partly unanswered after the studies reviewed above.
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Lindquist / The Spread and Development of a New Adverb Type 137
Table 1
Corpora Used in the Investigation
Number of Words (millions)
New York Times, 1990
New York Times, 1995
New York Times, 2000
Independent, 1990
Independent, 1995
Independent, 2000
Longman Spoken American Corpus (LSAC), circa 1995
BNC, context-governed spoken component, circa 1990
BNC, demographic spoken component, circa 1990
Brown Corpus, 1961
Freiburg Brown Corpus clone (FROWN), 1992
London-Oslo/Bergen Corpus (LOB), 1961
Freiburg LOB Clone (FLOB), 1991
60
53
67
35
35
45
5
6
4
1
1
1
1
1. Is the use of these adverbs more frequent in spoken English than in written English?
2. Has the use increased or decreased during the ten-year period 1990-2000?
3. Is there a difference in frequency between American English and British English,
and if so, does it change throughout time?
4. What morphological constraints are there for the formation of the adverbs?
5. In what registers are the adverbs used most frequently?
For the first three questions, I will present new quantitative data of a type that has
not been published before. In relation to the last two questions, I will provide data
and analyses that complement those given in earlier studies. Finally, I will make
some comments regarding the possible motivations behind the development of these
adverbs.
Material and Method
Material
For the study of relatively rare lexical phenomena, a large corpus material is
necessary. In this investigation, the corpora listed in table 1 were used.
The newspaper CD-ROMs were used because they provide reasonably comparable
corpora of both American and British English.7 They are also good sources for innovative language because journalistic prose has been shown to be a “fast” (Mair 1998,
155) or “agile” (Mair and Hundt 1999) genre that picks up new trends quickly. One
further advantage of these newspaper corpora is that they provide a time span of ten
years, which can be exploited for short-time diachronic studies. There is a certain risk
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138 Journal of English Linguistics
in using just one newspaper from each regional variety, and ideally more newspapers
would be searched. But there is always a limit to the amount of data that can be used
for any investigation, and in any case a broad coverage of the language is guaranteed
by the fact that the newspapers contain a very wide variety of texts by many different
writers, even if one has to keep in mind that all newspaper writing is subject to editorial control.
A drawback with newspaper CDs is that the publishers do not provide figures for
the total number of words, so their sizes have to be calculated by the researcher. For
the New York Times in 1995, Minugh (2000, 62-63) has provided the figure 52 million
words. Putting this figure in relation to the relative size in megabytes of the text files
on the CD-ROMs, the figures for 1990 and 2000 were calculated. For the Independent
1990 and 1995, exact figures have been calculated at the Research and Development
Unit for English Studies, Birmingham, UK (Antoinette Renouf, personal communication), and the figures for 2000 were then extrapolated with the same method as was
used for the New York Times.8
For spoken data, I compared the results of my own searches in the Longman
Spoken American Corpus (LSAC) with results from the spoken components in the
BNC as presented by Cowie (2006). The demographic component of the BNC contains mainly informal conversation, whereas the context-governed component contains
various kinds of more planned and formal spoken discourse. The Longman Spoken
American Corpus comprises a mixture of both, although conversation predominates.
Finally, the classic “Brown family” corpora were checked in one instance, but it
turned out that 1 million words was too small a size for this type of study.
Search Method
Because the newspaper CD-ROMs are not created for use by linguists, searching
them can be somewhat cumbersome. For the Independent, the search engine Freeway
provided by Chadwyck-Healy was used to retrieve all articles containing -wise, which
were then saved in their entirety to disk as text files. In the next step, these text files
were searched by means of Wordsmith to create concordances. The New York Times
CD-ROMs were searched directly by Wordsmith. The Wordsmith searches were made
with the wildcard * (i.e., *wise) so that all examples containing adverbs in -wise written solidly, with a hyphen, or as two separate graphic words were extracted.9 In the
next step, the approximately 30,000 concordance lines retrieved were sorted, and all
irrelevant examples (adjectives, manner adverbs, and instances of otherwise, likewise,
and the independent word wise) were deleted manually.
Frequency Distribution in American and British English
As mentioned already, it is generally agreed that the use of viewpoint adverbs in -wise
is American in origin. Most commentators so far have also claimed that the use has
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Lindquist / The Spread and Development of a New Adverb Type 139
Table 2
Viewpoint Adverbs in -wise in the New York Times and
the Independent 1990, 1995, and 2000
Tokens
New York Times, 1990
New York Times, 1995
New York Times, 2000
Independent, 1990
Independent, 1995
Independent, 2000
Types
N
Per 10 Million
Words
N
Per 10 Million
Words
77
77
132
29
101
153
12.8
14.5
19.7
8.3
28.9
34.0
58
57
95
26
86
106
9.7
10.8
14.2
7.4
24.6
23.6
continued to be predominantly American (Quirk et al. 1985, 568; Huddleston and
Pullum 2002, 567). Lenker (2002, 159), however, claimed, “A broad variety of wisecoinages [of the viewpoint type] is found in comparable numbers in all major varieties of English—African, American, Australian, British, Indian, and New Zealand
English” (emphasis in the original). But her claim is based on a study of a number
of 1-million-word corpora, and, as will be seen below, the low number of occurrences in such small corpora makes it impossible to make reliable claims about comparative frequency. Nevertheless, Lenker added examples from the Independent
(1993), the Guardian (1999 and 2000), and the Observer (1999 and 2000), proving
that the type is at least firmly established in British English. Opdahl (2003, 64) noted
that the -wise suffix is frequent in the BNC but made no distinction between manner
and viewpoint adverbs. Cowie (2006) also used the BNC as data and was able to
confirm that viewpoint adverbs in -wise are indeed productive and frequent in British
English. The fact that the data used for the present investigation consist of roughly
comparable American and British corpora makes it possible to present reliable
figures on present-day regional variation between American and British English and
signs of ongoing change, as will be seen in the following sections.
Written English
Despite the belief held by most commentators that viewpoint adverbs in -wise
have remained an American specialty, this has never been shown in figures. It is
therefore of interest to study the frequency distribution in comparable American and
British texts. Table 2 gives the number of tokens and types in the New York Times
and the Independent for the years 1990, 1995, and 2000. The development of frequencies throughout the period is shown graphically in figure 1.
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140 Journal of English Linguistics
Figure 1
Frequency of Viewpoint Adverbs in -wise in the New York Times and the
Independent, 1990, 1995, and 2000 (tokens per 10 million words)
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
1990
1995
NYT
2000
IND
As table 2 and figure 1 clearly show, the use of viewpoint adverbs in -wise developed in different ways in the British and the American newspaper throughout the
period. In 1990, the instances are few and far between in the Independent, but
already by 1995, the frequency figure has passed that of the New York Times, which
shows only a moderate increase. Between 1995 and 2000, there is a steady increase
in both newspapers, with the Independent still in the lead. In other words, British
English, as represented by the Independent, seems to have caught up with and overtaken American English, as represented by the New York Times, in the short period
under study.
To see whether the increase is due to increasing frequency of individual -wise
adverbs or to a high productivity, the productivity of the -wise adverbs must be measured. I used the method developed by Harald Baayen and coworkers as described
in, for example, Plag, Dalton-Puffer, and Baayen (1999, 214-17). First, the number
of tokens (N), types (V), and hapax legomena (n1) is counted. The idea is that in a
big corpus, the number of hapax legomena (hapaxes) will be a good indicator of the
number of neologisms, that is, how often the suffix in question is used productively
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Lindquist / The Spread and Development of a New Adverb Type 141
Table 3
Viewpoint Adverbs in -wise in the New York Times and
the Independent 1990, 1995, and 2000: Hapax Legomena and Productivity
New York Times, 1990
New York Times, 1995
New York Times, 2000
Independent, 1990
Independent, 1995
Independent, 2000
Hapax legomena (N)
Hapaxes/Tokens (%)
46
43
79
22
73
85
60
56
60
76
72
56
to create a new form. The productivity can then be expressed by the formula P = n1 / N.
Table 3 shows the number of hapaxes and the productivity figures for the New York
Times and the Independent.
The rate of hapaxes per token shows that the phenomenon is indeed very productive: new -wise adverbs seem to be continually produced and understood on the fly.
The figures for hapaxes / tokens in the newspaper corpora (56-76 percent) are somewhat higher than but similar to that in the BNC (which is 54 percent according to
Dalton-Puffer and Plag 2000, 236).
The British figures indicate that the proportion of hapaxes is going down, which
is a natural effect of the fact that the total frequency rises, so that it is more likely
that a particular form recurs. The American figures do not show this tendency. In
conclusion, it seems clear that the increased number of -wise tokens is due to the
high productivity of the suffix, not to the spread of individual lexical items.
A search made in the thirty-year span provided by the Brown Corpus, Freiburg
Brown Corpus clone (Frown), London-Oslo/Bergen Corpus (LOB), and Freiburg
LOB corpus clone (FLOB) yielded the following figures: Brown 3, Frown 1, LOB
0, and FLOB 1. The figures are extremely low and therefore clearly unreliable, but
at least they do not conflict with the picture that these adverbs occurred earlier in
American English than in British. The rise in frequency in British English in 1995
and 2000 is, of course, not registered here.
To conclude this section, the corpus figures for written language in the New York
Times and the Independent indicate clearly that the frequency of viewpoint adverbs
in -wise has increased throughout the period, that the increase is quicker in British
English so that that variety now has taken the lead in the use of viewpoint adverbs
in -wise, and that the rise in frequency is due to a very high productivity of the suffix.
Spoken English
It is hard to find comparable American and British spoken corpora, especially of
conversation.10 To investigate whether there are any differences between American
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142 Journal of English Linguistics
Table 4
Viewpoint Adverbs in -wise in the Longman Spoken American
Corpus and the Spoken Components of the British National
Corpus: Tokens, Types, Hapax Legomena, and Productivity
Longman Spoken American Corpus, 5 million
words, circa 1995
British National Corpus, context-governed
spoken, 6.2 million words, circa 1990
British National Corpus, demographic spoken,
4.2 million words, circa 1990
Tokens
N
Types
N
Hapaxes
N
Hapaxes/Tokens
%
38
29
24
63
37
31
17
46
27
22
16
59
Source: British National Corpus figures from Cowie (2006).
and British spoken language, I compared the frequencies in the spoken components
of the BNC, as presented by Cowie (2006, 11), with those in the Longman Spoken
American Corpus. The figures are given in table 4.
It would be unwise to draw far-reaching conclusions from these figures, but calculating tokens /10 million words gives the result 76/10 million words for the Longman
Spoken American Corpus and 62/10 million words for all of BNC spoken, which
means that the British figures, which are from 1990, are very similar to the American
ones from 1995. As the numbers for written English in table 2 capture, the British
figure for 1990 was 8.3/10 million, and the American for 1995 14.5/10 million. This
suggests that in spoken British English, the increase in frequency had already started
in 1990, so that the levels were almost equal to those of spoken American English of
five years later, whereas in written English this increase does not show until in 1995.
The productivity figures are similar to those in the written data.11 The next section
develops further comparisons between spoken and written corpora.
Comparing Frequencies in Speech and Writing
Viewpoint adverbs in -wise have been claimed to be more productive in spoken
language (e.g., Plag, Dalton-Puffer, and Baayen 1999, 220). Frequencies in the spoken and written corpora will now be compared. The relative frequencies are given in
table 5 and graphically illustrated in figure 2.
In spite of possible errors caused by the uncertainty regarding the size of the newspaper corpora, it seems reasonably safe to conclude that viewpoint adverbs in -wise are
more frequent in speech than in writing, even when, as here, the comparison is made
with newspapers, which are closer to spoken language than many other written genres.
In fact, many of the tokens in the written corpora consist of reported and represented
speech. Cowie (2006, 22) found that 46 percent of the 140 instances of viewpoint
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Lindquist / The Spread and Development of a New Adverb Type 143
Table 5
Frequency of Viewpoint Adverbs in -wise Normalized per 1 Million
Words in Spoken and Written American and British Corpora
Approximate
Size (millions)
Tokens
Tokens per
1 Million Words
60
53
67
35
35
45
5
6
4
77
77
132
29
101
153
38
37
27
1.3
1.5
2.0
0.8
2.9
3.4
7.6
6.2
6.8
New York Times, 1990
New York Times, 1995
New York Times, 2000
Independent, 1990
Independent, 1995
Independent, 2000
Longman Spoken American Corpus, circa 1995
BNC, context-governed component, circa 1990
BNC, demographic component, circa 1990
Figure 2
Frequency of Viewpoint Adverbs in -wise Normalized per 1 Million
Words in Spoken and Written American and British Corpora
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
NYT
1990
NYT
1995
NYT
2000
IND
1990
IND
1995
IND
2000
LSAC
BNCcont
BNCdemo
adverbs in -wise in the BNC could be classified as “represented speech” (direct speech
+ reported speech, free indirect discourse, and what she calls “personal testimony”—
that is, written but oral-like texts about personal matters). An analysis of this study’s
written data along the same lines results in the figures in table 6.
The figures in table 6 show that viewpoint adverbs in -wise are used in represented speech in a large majority of the cases in the New York Times. But the figures
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144 Journal of English Linguistics
Table 6
Proportion of Viewpoint Adverbs in -wise Occurring in Represented Speech in
the New York Times and the Independent, 1990-2000
New York Times
Represented speech
Other
Independent
Represented speech
Other
N
%
234
53
82
18
112
171
40
60
for the Independent are almost a mirror image of those of the New York Times: slightly
fewer than half of the viewpoint adverbs in -wise are used in represented speech in
the British paper. This seems to suggest that the usage is more acceptable in ordinary
non-speech-representing written journalistic prose in Britain than in the United
States.12 It is far from nonexistent, however, in American journalistic prose. Examples
(7) and (8) are taken from a book review and a piece of social commentary:
(7) The history here is familiar, though it reads differently in Laskin’s depoliticized
context, shorn of its intellectual import, turned on its head gender-wise. Mary
McCarthy leaves Philip Rahv, a Partisan Review editor, to hurl herself into bed
with, and marriage to, Edmund Wilson, whose prose style she was said to admire
more” (NYT 2000).
(8) This was an auction, and each bachelor was offering his own date excursion, available to the highest bidder. The women wrote their bids on sheets of paper pinned
to the bachelors’ backs. Gender-wise, it flipped the usual order of the pickup scene
(NYT 2000).
The high figure for “Other” in the Independent is close to the figure for nonspeech-representing prose in Cowie’s BNC data (54 percent). The examples of represented speech in the newspapers are different from the examples of authentic
speech found in the Longman Spoken American Corpus and the spoken component
of the BNC in that many of them consist of statements or answers to interviewers’
questions. The speakers seem to be anxious not to be misunderstood or perhaps misquoted, and therefore clarify what they are referring to by means of the viewpoint
adverb as in (9).
(9) The interim acting district superintendent, Ulysses Byas, said the situation had never
been dangerous. The asbestos found was not airborne, he said, and the air quality in
the school was fine. ‘The tests of air quality have been acceptable at all times,’ Mr.
Byas said. ‘Nobody has been affected, health-wise.’ But because the asbestos has to
be removed, he said, it may be months before things return to normal (NYT 1990).
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Lindquist / The Spread and Development of a New Adverb Type 145
Table 7
The Distribution of Viewpoint Adverbs in -wise over Domains
in the New York Times, 1990, 1995 and 2000
Sports
Art and entertainment
Living
Politics and (oral) official statements
Business
Health and environment
Science
Total
New York
Times,
1990
New York
Times,
1995
New York
Times,
2000
N
%
N
%
N
%
N
%
18
20
16
11
9
3
0
77
23
26
21
14
12
4
0
32
20
4
10
6
4
1
77
42
26
5
13
8
5
1
54
30
17
16
12
3
0
132
41
23
13
12
9
2
0
104
70
37
37
27
10
1
286
36
24
13
13
9
3
0
Total
Although for partially practical reasons, this section has dealt with written and spoken data separately, it may be that the notions of register, domain, and formality are
of greater relevance. These will be dealt with in the next section.
Registers, Domains, and Levels of Formality
As shown in the review of previous work, a number of different registers have been
proposed as privileging -wise adverbs. Because the newspaper CD-ROMs are only
roughly divided into different sections, with different subdivisions in the New York
Times and the Independent (cf. Levin [2001, 52-54] for a discussion of the subgenres
in these newspapers and further references), I performed a close manual analysis of
each example based on the content, thus using internal factors rather than external for
the register categorization. The registers and the distribution of examples can be seen
in tables 7 and 8. The categories were created and refined as the analysis proceeded,
and in the end a number of minor categories were subsumed under two main headings,
so that arts and entertainment includes art, entertainment, film, theater, music, dance,
literature, publishing, food, and television, whereas living includes social life, housing
and architecture, travel, hobbies, and consumer technology.
The picture that emerges from tables 7 and 8 is that viewpoint adverbs in -wise
are used in several domains in newspaper reporting and in particular in sports, art
and entertainment, and living. Examples (10) and (11) show that the use has been
picked up by native as well as non-native professional tennis players, example (12)
is from the world of opera, and (13) is a description of a neighborhood.
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146 Journal of English Linguistics
Table 8
The Distribution of Viewpoint Adverbs in -wise Over Domains in the
Independent, 1990, 1995, and 2000
Independent,
1990
Sports
Art and entertainment
Living
Politics and (oral) official statements
Business
Health and environment
Science
Total
Independent,
1995
Independent,
2000
Total
N
%
N
%
N
%
N
%
8
10
5
2
2
1
1
29
28
34
17
7
7
3
3
29
38
19
7
8
0
0
101
29
38
19
7
8
0
0
50
52
35
4
9
2
1
153
32
34
23
3
6
2
1
87
100
59
13
19
3
2
283
31
35
21
5
7
1
1
(10) ‘He always wanted to be in control . . . and now he’s seeing he can control his
own destiny tenniswise,’ said Gerulaitis” (NYT 1990).
(11) Playing-wise, I think I’ve played enough on clay, said Edberg (NYT 1990).
(12) We are lucky to have a young cast that is matched vocally and age-wise and
talent-wise (NYT 1995).
(13) You can go to West Hollywood and find the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s still intact in various forms. Visually, architecturally and style-wise, you’re living in a continuous
past (NYT 1995).
Business, which was mentioned by the early American commentators along with
sport and entertainment, figures less prominently. For an example, see (14).
Examples from politics, also mentioned by early commentators, are more common
in the American newspaper than in the British but on the whole rather rare—see
example (15). Examples from science and health and environment, such as (16) and
(17), are quite infrequent.
(14) Airlines are doing well, earnings-wise, notwithstanding all of their problems
(NYT 2000).
(15) But Buchanan, position-wise, is antigay, for example (NYT 2000).
(16) [H]e replied that DNA from many people was being used but that it didn’t matter
because everyone on the planet is 99.9 percent the same DNA-wise anyway
(NYT 1990).
(17) ‘Patient-education-wise, it can’t be beat,’ said Dr Michael Miles, a root-canal
specialist in Wausau, Wis. (NYT 1990).
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Lindquist / The Spread and Development of a New Adverb Type 147
Obviously, the figures will be strongly influenced by the type of data used, so it
is no great surprise that these findings differ from those of Lenker and others. The
sports sections in the newspapers are big, which helps explain the prominence of
sports in the tables. The high figures for art and entertainment and also living can
be explained by the “reviewing function” mentioned by Cowie: reviewers organize
their reviews by means of -wise adverbs, as in example (18):
(18) Cast-wise, Barbara Bonney and Rainer Trost are properly fetching as the feisty
young things Valencienne and Camille: their gorgeous Act 2 duet (bright with
the tinsel of Lehar’s harp and piccolo) is a highlight (IND 1995).
This use is particularly common in the British newspaper in reviews of books, films,
plays, exhibitions, and so on, or in commentaries and columns on diverse aspects of
modern living and various social phenomena.13
A second factor is the use of represented speech in these registers. Sports coaches,
players, artists, and, much less often, politicians, official spokespersons, businessmen,
and the man or woman in the street are quoted when they comment on games, transfer deals, injuries, music, current affairs, or their own personal situation.
Cowie (2006, 19-27) found that many of the written, non-speech-representing
examples in the BNC were from texts aimed at groups of specialists, but not necessarily professionals, which she calls “close knit ‘hobby’ communities.” This “nerd
factor” is less prominent in the newspapers. A specialist interest is often taken for
granted there as well, but the audience is less tightly defined. The interactive
addressing of a generic second person mentioned by Cowie (2006, 27) is almost
nonexistent.
To conclude this section, viewpoint -wise in the newspapers has a strong element
of informality. It is frequent in represented speech and is predominantly used in sections dealing with “less serious” topics like sports and entertainment. The relatively
rare instances in texts about business, politics, and science typically occur in quoted
spoken language. This finding squares well with the fact that these adverbs are more
frequent in conversation than in the newspapers. There are, however, signs that they
are spreading to new registers, presumably as part of the ongoing general colloquialization of the written language (cf. Mair and Hundt 1999, 225-26).
One important factor in the rapid diffusion of viewpoint adverbs in -wise seems
to be the versatility with which new forms are created. This will be the topic of the
next section.
Word Formation
The morphological status of -wise is not totally clear. More than thirty-five years
ago, Marchand (1969, 210) was not convinced that -wise was a proper suffix:
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148 Journal of English Linguistics
Halfway between second-words and suffixes are certain second elements which are still
felt to be words though they are no longer used in isolation: -monger, -wright, and -wise
exist only as second parts of combinations. I have treated them as semi-suffixes.
Still, Marchand recognized that -wise may indeed develop into a bona fide suffix:
“Moreover, wise is being used less and less as an independent word and may, as a
semi-suffix, one day come to reach the state of F [French] -ment” (Marchand 1969,
358).14 The OED noted that it “has the appearance of a suffix” (OED s.v. wise, sb. 1,
II), whereas Quirk et al. (1985, 438) wrote that adverbs can be created by means of the
suffix -ly and also -wise, -ward(s), -fashion, -ways, and -style. More recently, Biber
et al. (1999, 540) followed Quirk et al. in considering -wise a suffix, as did Huddleston
and Pullum (2002, 766). Among specialized word formation studies, Bauer (1983,
225) and Plag (2003, 98) listed -wise as a suffix that derives adverbs from nouns.
Yezbick and Traugott (2005, 109-10), however, went one step further and seemed to
imply that -wise is becoming a clitic.
As mentioned by Lenker, one of the advantages of the -wise suffix is that it can be
added to Germanic bases, and this is also by far the most common type of base in this
study’s data. But in about 13 percent (22/173) of the types in the written American
material, 10 percent (2/21) in the spoken American material, and 8 percent (13/161) in
the written British material, the -wise suffix is added to words of Greco-Latin origin
that in principle could also have taken the -(ic)ally ending, either directly, as in musicwise: musically; education-wise: educationally; and nutrition-wise: nutritionally, or
with some slight modification, as in context-wise: contextually; hygiene-wise: hygienically; and quality-wise: qualitatively.15 The two forms may not, however, be semantically identical in all cases and in all contexts. For instance, musically and hygienically
can have positive connotations, suggesting high levels of musicality and hygiene,
whereas music-wise and hygiene-wise do not. The slightly higher figures for the
Greco-Latin bases in the American corpora suggest that the -wise suffix can be used
with fewer restrictions by American language users than by British.
That the two options are available simultaneously in a speaker’s repertoire—but
not necessarily for a given word in any context—is shown by the fact that viewpoint
adverbs in -(ic)ally and -wise often occur in the same sentence. Illustrative examples
from these data when -wise adverbs are conjoined syndetically (19)-(21), (23) or
asyndetically (22) with -(ic)ally adverbs are given below. These examples also illustrate the usefulness of -wise in creating nonce forms that are needed to achieve
adverb-adverb symmetry in the coordination (see italicized text).
(19) We wanted to win this race, and we did it, Schumacher said. A very tight race
and Coulthard really pushed from the first to the last lap. That meant a very
tough race physically, and car-wise (NYT 2000).
(20) The D.A. said I’m going to take this population that would otherwise end up in
prison and divert them into treatment, said Anne Swern, a deputy district attorney who runs D-TAP. If they fail the program, they go to jail. But what we’ve
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Lindquist / The Spread and Development of a New Adverb Type 149
found is that D-TAP can deal with these people with risks to the public that are low
and benefits that are very high both financially and recidivism-wise (NYT 2000).
(21) ‘Environmentally and health wise we were lucky,’ she said (NYT 1990; emphasis
added).
(22) Ms. Hochberg (pronounced HOTCH-berg) succeeded the energetic and respected
Michael Chertoff. ‘She’s filling very big shoes,’ said Gerald Krovatin, who
worked with her at Lowenstein, Sandler, Kohl, Fisher and Boylan in Roseland.
‘But she’s Mike’s equal intellectually, administratively, integrity-wise’ (NYT 1995).
(23) ‘It’s not a question of confidence; it’s just, I have put everything in the first three
matches,’ he said. ‘I had nothing left to put into the match energy-wise and
mentally’ (NYT 1995).
Switches from an adverb in -(ic)ally to an adverb in -wise as in (19)-(22) are more
common than switches in the opposite direction, as in (23). The coordination of two
or more viewpoint adverbs in -wise, as in (24)-(27), is also quite frequent.
(24) ‘I think Rik would prefer to go against Patrick size-wise and age-wise, Miller
said. They both move the same because they’re up there in age (NYT 2000).
(25) I spent every weekend and every day before we shot working on the dialogue,
said Mr. LaBute. But character-wise, plot-wise, it’s very much what the guys
wrote (NYT 2000).
(26) ‘Given the state of relations, race-wise and police-wise, in a broader sense, this
is probably the worst time for a case like this to come up in anybody’s jurisdiction,’ Mr. Colville said (NYT 1995).
(27) It is a very scenic place. It is also a very funny place in the sense of funny as a
bit strange: a state-owned airport that also seems to be somewhat of a nature preserve, where airplanes and air birds co-exist in a delicate relationship overseen
not only by the State Department of Transportation, which owns the airport, but
also by other governmental agencies that are interested in what is going on there,
animal-wise and bird-wise (NYT 1995).
As pointed out by Guimier (2001, 158), such coordination shows that a proposition
is valid from several points of view (in several domains) at the same time.
Lenker (2002, 176) suggested that the origin of viewpoint adverbs in -wise is to
be found in coordination with otherwise, but only one example of such a coordination, given in (28), occurs in this study’s modern material.
(28) We’ve been playing with each other for a long time now and that makes a big difference on the court. Not making the bid last year let us see that we were our own
biggest enemies. This year, we’re a little more mature, basketball wise, and otherwise (NYT 2000).
Apart from 1- to 5-syllable nouns as base words, the material contains cases in which
the suffix is added to a noun compound, as in bottom-line-wise, name-recognitionwise, and love-life-wise; a coordinated noun phrase (NP) as in sex-and-violence-wise;
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150 Journal of English Linguistics
Table 9
Abstract and Concrete Base Words in the New York Times
and the Independent
New York Times
Independent
Abstract Types
Concrete Types
Total Types
N
%
N
%
N
%
137
176
80
85
35
31
20
15
172
207
100
100
or a more or less established NP consisting of adjective + noun, as in current-affairswise and great-line-wise.16 Because many of these are somewhat clumsy and stylistically marked, they are presumably used mainly to create a special effect. I agree with
Cowie (2006, 12) that NP complexity is probably a relevant factor for the choice
between -wise and other viewpoint adverbials like with respect to X, as regards X, and
as far as X (is concerned), so that complex bases are more likely to occur with these
other constructions: as regards name recognition, and so on.
Because viewpoint adverbs tend to be used in certain registers, it is a natural consequence that words from certain semantic fields predominate among the bases to
which -wise is added. It is of some interest, however, to study what general category
of noun the suffix is added to. Table 9 shows the distribution between abstract (e.g.,
career, crime, culture) and concrete (e.g., cake, cat, clothes) base noun types in the
New York Times and the Independent.
Abstract base words are most common. There is a slight difference between the
newspapers in the proportion of concrete nouns: 20 percent in the New York Times
and 15 percent in the Independent. This difference might be taken to indicate that
American users feel freer to use -wise with a larger variety of nouns, including concrete ones. This in its turn again suggests that there are fewer constraints on the use
of the -wise suffix in American English and that the use is generalized to a wider
spectrum of contexts in that variety.
It is a common assumption that “most affixes can be added to only certain word
classes” (Bauer 2001, 133), and viewpoint adverbs in -wise are generally described
as denominal. From 1995, however, there are instances in the data of affix generalization, with -wise being added to adjectives when one would have expected the
already existing form in -(al)ly to block the addition of -wise or, possibly, in some of
the cases, the use of a denominal form such as strategy-wise instead: strategic-wise,
competetivewise (NYT 1995), academic-wise, cerebral-wise (NYT 2000), and
social-wise (IND 1995). Lenker (2002, 160, 177 n. 5) found two instances of such a
form, biologicalwise, and commented, “This peculiar deadjectival form found in one
source in the corpus of East African English should probably be regarded as a true
nonce-formation.” Cowie also took for granted that viewpoint adverbs in -wise are
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Lindquist / The Spread and Development of a New Adverb Type 151
adnominal, although in fact she herself later gave a de-adjectival example from the
spoken component of the BNC, strong-wise (2006, 17). Yezbick and Traugott mentioned mental wise and Islamic wise. Although some of these examples might
arguably be written off as performance errors or as the ellipsis of a noun modified
by the adjective, as suggested by Yezbick and Traugott (2005, 110), I nevertheless
believe that they can be seen as signs that -wise is becoming more prone to affix generalization. This study even witnesses one instance in the spoken data in which -wise
is added to an adverb, in (29):
(29) That’s pretty good. I just, what it boils down to, I liked the movie cinematicallywise, because I’m a fan. If you’re not a fan, it was boring (LSAC).
Yezbick and Traugott (2005, 109-10) reported on one similar case from the Internet,
chronologically wise, and see this behavior of -wise as a sign that it has developed
into a clitic.
The data in this section have established that -wise is a relatively flexible element that can be added to nominal bases of various forms and occasionally to
adjectival and adverbial bases as well. With Latinate bases, it competes with (ic)ally. Overall, the American corpora display somewhat greater flexibility, which
may be explained by the slightly longer time these adverbs have had to develop in
American English. The next section addresses the motivation that may lie behind
this development.
Motivation
The question remains why the manner adverb suffix -wise was exapted (for the term
and the concept, see Lass 1997, 316-19) to function as a viewpoint adverb suffix or
clitic in the mid-1900s and why it is spreading so fast at the moment. One reason that
has been suggested by previous commentators is its usefulness. Viewpoint adverbs in
-wise belong to a set of longer and usually more formal viewpoint adverbials with similar functions that includes Adj + -ly + speaking (e.g., theoretically speaking), as
regards N, with respect to N, as far as N is concerned (Quirk et al. 1985, 569), and the
shortened form as far as (Rickford et al. 1995), but -wise adverbs are shorter and syntactically more flexible. The prototypical function of viewpoint adverbs is to limit the
validity or restrict the topic of utterances as in example (30), in which the bulldog was
best as far as features were concerned, but perhaps not in other respects.
(30) She featurewise, she was the best bulldog of the litter, by far (LSAC).17
They can also be used to organize the utterance, as in example (31), or to repair or
hedge an utterance, as in (32).
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152 Journal of English Linguistics
(31) Coach K said something I’ll remember for a lifetime. He said when you come here
you’re going to get the best of two worlds. You’re going to compete basketballwise against quality people day in and day out and it’s going to make you a better
player. And the exact same thing will happen with academics (NYT 2000).
(32) S1: So Jude you didn’t do anything today huh?
S2: Uh
S1: I mean errands wise (LSAC)
That speakers choose among competing viewpoint adverbials is shown by the fact
that they sometimes mix constructions, as in examples (33) and (34; italics added):
(33) I know how he feels right now as far as fatigue-wise, Elliott said yesterday from
San Antonio. When I first went to the doctor, I felt terrible. I can sympathize
with him (NYT 2000).
(34) And whatever you feel like as far as time wise (LSAC).
The example given in (35), with the complex preposition as for, is similar (italics
added):
(35) As for strengthwise, I know I’m building up (NYT 1990).
Such hybrid structures, in which speakers change tack to the -wise construction midsentence, are rare and mainly found in the American corpora, but Cowie (2006, 29)
reported one case in the spoken component of the BNC: as far as performance-wise.
Yezbick and Traugott (2005, 107) found one instance of a blend with an as construction in the Switchboard corpus: as a citizen wise.
Lenker (2002, 171-74) claimed that the rise of viewpoint adverbs in -wise can be
explained by a need to specify the domain of statements in science and technology
similar to what happened in the nineteenth century when viewpoint adverbs in -(ic)ally
developed; however, Cowie (2006) argued that this is hard to reconcile with the
present-day usage profile of these adverbs. Cowie instead proposed to explain the rise
of viewpoint adverbs in -wise by referring to the spoken discourse functions that they
fulfill. Two things, however, must be kept apart: the cause of the innovation18 (Croft
2000, 8, 31-32), on one hand, and the causes of the propagation19 (Croft 2000, 8), on the
other. As Croft (2000, 8) explained, “The mechanism for innovation is functional. . . .
The mechanism for propagation is a selection mechanism . . . and it is social.” The
importance of social factors in the spread of derivational suffixes has also been pointed
out by, for instance, Romaine (1985, 457) in a discussion of -ness. In the case of viewpoint adverbs in -wise, however, it seems quite likely that their usefulness in discourse
has remained a strong factor in their spread, in combination with social factors.
The present-day data suggest that viewpoint adverbs in -wise are most frequent in
spoken English and that they are spreading into some particular written genres. It is
still imaginable, however, that the innovation started in certain written genres in the
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Lindquist / The Spread and Development of a New Adverb Type 153
1940s in the United States, possibly related to business or politics, to fulfill certain
textual functions, and that it then spread into the spoken language and became more
frequent there, probably fulfilling slightly different functions, more related to social
prestige. Two different types of social prestige may be in play with -wise. First, in
the spread to the spoken language, there are users who want to sound authoritative
and important (officials, coaches, and minor league businessmen). In the second
step, the use has spread to newspaper writing with several functions: as quoted
speech, as a text organizer in reviews, and sometimes as a tongue-in-cheek stylistic
feature used by writers who want to appear modern. In a parallel development, the
use is spread from spoken language to spoken-like language on the Internet as a
youthful style marker.
Summary and Conclusion
This article has reviewed the literature dealing with viewpoint adverbs in -wise
and reported on a quantitative investigation of these adverbs in a number of recent
corpora, taking distributional, diachronic, morphological, and functional factors into
account. The frequency figures from the New York Times and the Independent for
1990-2000 show that the use is increasing in both varieties; they also suggest that
British English has caught up with and passed American English, at least in the
press. Such comparative frequency data have not been presented before.
It has been suggested by many commentators that the origin of these adverbs lies
in the spoken language, and the present study demonstrates that -wise viewpoint
adverbs are at least twice as frequent in conversation as they are in newspaper text—
which is probably the written text type in which they are most common, possibly
with the exception of hobby magazines and informal texts on the Internet. It is also
shown that many of the examples in the newspapers occur in “represented speech,”
mainly by people in sports and entertainment but also, to a lesser degree, by politicians and other “serious” public figures making official statements.
Previous studies have claimed that in writing, viewpoint adverbs in -wise are typically used in technical registers (Lenker 2002), youthful Internet language (Yezbick
and Traugott 2005), or hobby texts and “pop lore” (Cowie 2006). The findings in the
present investigation are closest to Cowie’s. In the newspapers, the major domains
include sports, art and entertainment, and living.
Morphologically, the suffix can be used with Germanic as well as Latinate nouns,
and has extended its range of bases from nouns to noun phrases (thus behaving like
a clitic) and also, to some extent, generalized to adjectives and adverbs. These extensions are more frequent in the American material, in which the viewpoint adverbs in
-wise have been frequent for some time, than in British English, in which their frequency has increased more recently.
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154 Journal of English Linguistics
The development and spread of the -wise adverbs seem to be motivated by both
functional and social factors. In future research, the various functional categories
suggested especially by Guimier (2005) and Cowie (2006) ought to be studied in
more detail. It will also be interesting to see if the frequency of the -wise adverbs
will continue to grow, if they will spread to more formal genres, and if their generalization to bases other than nouns will continue.
Notes
1. Abbreviations in brackets indicate the source of the example: IND + year = Independent on CDROM; NYT + year = New York Times on CD-ROM (Independent n.d.; New York Times n.d.); and the
Longman Spoken American Corpus (LSAC). For further information about the data, see section 3.
2. Dalton-Puffer and Plag (2000, 236) used the term manner/dimension adverbs.
3. The joke is developed further on the Internet Movie Database Web page (n.d.), where the tagline
for the movie is given as follows: “Movie-wise, there has never been anything like it, laugh-wise, lovewise or otherwise-wise!”
4. In spite of considerable efforts, I have not been able to acquire a style guide from the Independent,
the other newspaper used in this investigation.
5. Lenker searched the following corpora, all containing 1 million words or fewer: ACE (Australian
English), Brown and Frown (American English), ICE EA (East African English), Kolhapur (Indian
English), WWC and WSC (New Zealand English), and LLC (British English).
6. Guimier writes, “Il s’agit à nouveau de restreindre la validité de l’énoncé, mais rétrospectivement,
comme pour réparer un oubli” (“It is again a matter of restricting the validity of the utterance, but retrospectively, as if to repair an oversight”); and “L’adverbe . . . sert à justifier [la proposition] a posteriori”
(“The adverb . . . justifies [the proposition] a posteriori”) (emphasis in the original; my translations).
7. Sometimes, the term archive is used for collections of text like newspaper CD-ROMs that have
not been compiled to make up a balanced picture of a particular subset of the language or the language
as a whole. For simplicity’s sake, they will be called corpora here.
8. There is a certain degree of uncertainty in these extrapolations, but the results from the comparisons made in this article between the New York Times and the Independent on the one hand and among
different years on the other are so robust that this should not be a problem.
9. Writing conventions vary in the printed sources and are not taken into consideration here, although
a tendency to write more common adverbs solidly can be detected. In the transcribed spoken data, spelling
is, of course, dependent on the transcribers’ conventions.
10. For instance, the MICASE corpus (almost 2 million words) consists of only academic spoken
English, the Santa Barbara Corpus is small and only partially available, and the various telephone corpora
and newscast corpora available from the Linguistic Data Consortium have no obvious British counterparts.
11. The low number of hapaxes given by Cowie for the context-governed spoken component of the BNC
is probably due to an error, because this number does not square with the number of types and tokens.
12. The high number of tokens in represented speech in the New York Times might suggest that the
paper contains a larger proportion of represented speech than the Independent. But rather the opposite
seems to be the case. Magnus Levin (personal communication) found in his investigation of agreement
with collective nouns like team and crew that his examples came from quoted speech in 10 percent of the
cases from the New York Times and in 13 percent of the cases in the Independent. For the sports sections
only, the figures were 14 and 16 percent respectively.
13. Incidentally, reviewing, assessing, and describing were shown to be central in a recent study of the
productivity of another suffix, -esque (Ljung 2005). Ljung was interested in the influence of genre on word
formation and found that adjectives in -esque occur most frequently in reviews, commentary, biography,
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Lindquist / The Spread and Development of a New Adverb Type 155
sports, travel, fashion, and columns (Ljung 2005, 123-24). The “home” domains of the adjective suffix
-esque thus partially overlap with those of viewpoint -wise.
14. Because French -ment is a manner adverb suffix, obviously Marchand was thinking of the manner adverb suffix -wise here.
15. Contextual factors may well have motivated the choice of -wise in some of these cases.
16. In fact, there seem to be few restrictions as to what can serve as a base, and one frequently comes
across creative usages in various sources, as for instance in the following example with a postmodified
noun (Magnus Levin, personal communication): “She’d said ‘my car’, which had sounded strange, vowof-poverty-wise, another one to add to the list of questions he might ask her sometimes” (Elmore
Leonard, Bandits; emphasis added).
17. The initial she in this spoken example is obviously due to performance factors.
18. This was dubbed “the actuation problem” by Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (1968, 102).
19. Another commonly used term is diffusion; see for instance Labov (2001).
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Hans Lindquist is associate professor of English linguistics at Växjö University, Sweden. His main
research interests are phraseology, varieties of English, and corpus linguistics.
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