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separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com · 1d · discuss

Here's a story of curiosity and exploration and enjoying where it took me.I was (orig. AmE) fooling around with a corpus interface (in preparation for teaching students how to use it), and I asked it for adjectives that go after the adverb altogether. I don't know why I chose that word, but I did. And I noticed something: in the British National Corpus (BNC), the word was followed by adjectives that struck me as strange. Things like: altogether happy, altogether lovely, and altogether innocent.Negative and positive?At first, I wondered: does altogether have different semantic prosody in British and American English?...