What’s going on here anyway(s)? A sociolinguistic perspective on specialization
This paper investigates variation and change in a little-studied morphological variable, the adverbial suffix -s, in words in ‘-ward(s)’, e.g. ‘toward(s)’, ‘inward(s)’, and ‘-way(s)’, e.g. ‘anyway(s)’, ‘halfway(s)’. Explanations for variation between -s and -∅ are fraught with contradiction in the literature. Some scholars argue that language-internal factors, e.g. functional specialization, play a role, whereas others say that variation is random. Our large-scale comparative variationist analysis of these adverbs in the Ontario dialects reveals evidence of a different type of specialization, with words in ‘-ward(s)’ increasingly taking -s and words in ‘-way(s)’ generally without. ‘Anyway(s)’ is an exception with -s increasing and men and speakers of a lower education level leading this change. Thus, we have discovered a change from below. The fact that the frequency of the -s suffix differs across grammatical categories and lexical items is likely due to the fact that this systemic change is still in progress.
