Linguistics 203: Handout
Week 4: October 16, 2002

Tidbits from Rickford, Wasow, Mendoza-Denton, & Espinoza
“Syntactic variation and change in progress:
Loss of the verbal coda in topic-restricting as far as constructions”.
Language 71, pp. 102-131 (1995)

1. As far as the organized resistance is concerned, that's pretty much taken care of. (Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly, 60s, TV newscast, 12/21/89)
   
2. Now as far as misunderstanding goes, I'd just like to focus ... (Bill Labov, 50s, 10/85)
   
3. As far as the white servants Ø, it isn't clear. (Renee Blake, 22, 5/5/87)
   
4. The only catch as far as grad students are concerned, is that you have to be at least 25 ... (Diane Olsen, 30, email, 3/13/92)
   
5. Results of this summit were positive as far as the Soviet desires went. (President George Bush, 60s, quoted in UPI story, 7/12/90)
   
6. The presence of be2 forms, which compensates for gaps in the SAE aspectual system, also has repercussions as far as affecting progressive constructions Ø. (Carmen Richardson, 20s, in paper in American Speech 66.3 (1991), p 301)
   
7. As or so far as x cannot be used short for as far as x goes or so far as concerns x. (Fowler, Henry Watson (1926.) A dictionary of modern English usage)
   
8. The incomplete as far as is the most egregious misuse of the language today. It is dangerous, And it is epidemic. Preschool teachers and parents must whisper 'as far as (such and such) is concerned' into children's ears even as they sleep. The truncation must be stamped out. Users should be condemned to a life of coitus interruptus. (Television sportscaster Ray Gandolf (quoted in The Harper dictionary of contemporary usage (1985), pp. 49-50)
   
9. Over an eight year period, we have collected over 1200 tokens of the as far as construction from a variety of sources. About 500 of these tokens come from systematic searches of computer corpora, including subsets of a United Press International (UPI) corpus, a New York Times corpus, the Switchboard (telephone conversation) corpus, and corpora of electronic mail and bulletin board correspondence. Some of the remaining 700 examples are from recorded sociolinguistic interviews, but unlike phonological variables, which show up with high frequencies in such interviews, syntactic variables often involve special semantic and pragmatic circumstances which may occur rarely or unpredictably in interview settings…As a result, most of our spoken as far as examples come from participant observation in informal conversations, lectures and meetings in which the members of our research team--and a dedicated cadre of contributors including our students and colleagues--were involved. We also monitored TV and radio broadcasts, and culled examples from newspapers, articles, books, and students' exams and final papers, jotting down each example as it occurred and/or was noticed. This method has been successfully followed in variation studies of other syntactic variables….Although it is not as exhaustive as an electronic search of a computer corpus, this kind of monitoring usually yields richer data about the speaker and the circumstances of production, and it can be very systematic and reliable, particularly when the variable involves a lexical trigger--in our case the occurrence of 'as far as' before its following noun phrase and the site of the potential verbal coda.
   
10. One reviewer has raised the question of whether we might have tended to note primarily the verbless as far as variants in our monitoring of informal conversations and the media. Because we tried to record every as far as sentence token we encountered, regardless of whether it had a verbal coda or not, and because it was the lexical phrase 'as far as' which triggered us to write each example down, and not whether it had a verbal coda, we do not believe the 'participant observation' portion of our data set is biased towards verbless examples. In fact, the proportion of verbless variants in this portion of our data set (58% of 657 tokens ) is lower than in a random sample of the telephone switchboard corpus (76% of 116 tokens) which we searched systematically and exhaustively with this issue in mind.

(11) SURVEY RESULTS FOR AS FAR AS EXAMPLES, FROM 180 RESPONDENTS

#3. That's sort of my personal view, as far as that's concerned.
#5. As far as ball technique and tactics Ø, this area is years behind other areas.
#6. They are still very much alive, as far as the divisional race goes.
#8. As far as 16-bit graphics being 'true color' is concerned, this is nonsense.
#10. As far as football is concerned, it's just another game.
#11. As far as filling out the details Ø, that isn't a problem.
#12. He sounds just like the other kids, as far as general style Ø.
#13. But as far as something to do on the weekend Ø, we didn't even have miniature golf.
#14. As far as the temperatures in the Bay Area tonight Ø, this is the way I see it.
#16. I'll never quit as far as trying to solve the case Ø. #18. They're not a cohesive unit as far as the areas we're dealing with are concerned.
#19. I need to know about lifestyle, because that's important, as far as where I'm going to be happy Ø.
#20. As far as how he got shot Ø, we don't know yet.

(12) VARBRUL weights for significant factors in as far as verb absence