One thing I learnt about this winter (summer, see below) that I like is a phenomenon called Positive Anymore, a way of using the adverb anymore in a non-negative context. Ordinarily we use it (in Australian English) in negative contexts, such as in I don't ride my tricycle anymore, and when we use it we mean that something used to be the case but is no longer such, at the time of utterance. But people in various parts of the USA use this word in contexts in which something that was not the case previously is now such. So, if one of those talkers wanted to express that they previously didn't ride their tricycle but in fact now do, they could say: I ride my tricycle anymore.

For me, anymore is only usable if the sentence it appears in is negated, and this association is so strong that when I say these Positive Anymore sentences aloud to myself I find it quite hard not to feel the meaning of {once true, now not}. There's a great short post on the Yale website that discusses this phenomenon and gives some examples of how people do and don't use it, including some examples from the early half of the twentieth century. There, you'll see that it's considered approximately equivalent to nowadays, which seems to be mostly true of the contemporary examples.

Positive Anymore was one of many interesting things I heard while I spent July and August in the USA. This was a bulk of my winter, but summer over there. I was situated primarily in Eugene, Oregon at the LSA Summer Institute, where I took classes on a variety of linguistics topics. Getting there was not a tricycle ride. The length of the flight(s) notwithstanding, my luggage didn't arrive with me when I got to Portland. Lovely news. The flight from Sydney to Vancouver had irritated me greatly: the food made me feel sick, there was a crying baby a few seats over from me, and I knew I had a few more transfers to go. After transferring from Vancouver to Portland I had to take a tram from the airport to downtown so I could hop on a train to Eugene. I was notified that my luggage would be delivered to an address of my choosing, at some unspecified point in time. This was great, since it wasn't like I wanted to change clothes or have a shower or anything sensible like that. I got on the tram, went some stops, watched a yeller get escorted off by five security people, went some more stops, got off the tram, walked through the pungent piss-smelling and tent-laden Chinatown, and made it to the train station just in time to hop on an earlier train than I'd originally booked. A few hours later I showed up in Eugene, around two hours past midday where my friend's aunt -- a long time Eugene resident, by funny coincidence -- picked me up and brought me back to her house to sleep and wait for my things to arrive.

July the 4th was the day I arrived, which explained why I saw a considerable number of pedestrians donning American flag-printed t-shirts. (I later realised that this particular kind of decoration is not in fact localised to Independence Day.) In perhaps an appropriately American fashion, I was taken to Walmart that day by my new friend (the aunt of my friend) to acquire some meantime underwear. They had just what I needed: 20-packs of underwear, SIM cards, eighty-six varieties of pound-sized bags of crisps, and high-powered hunting crossbows. Here I think I'd been awake for about thirty-two hours, and I was really dizzy. Unfortunately I slept quite poorly that night, getting perhaps six our so hours of sleep, although my suitcase did show up during that time which I appreciated. The next day I headed to the U of O campus to deliver my things to the dorm, pictured below, where I stayed for five weeks.

The Institute was great, thankfully, and the painful transit was worth it. Many wonderful people were met, many interesting classes were taken, and many dining hall meals were collectively suffered through. I think we all hoped the menus would eventually rotate, but sadly that hope was beaten out of us rather quickly. Anyway. There were some seriously good classes available; my definite favourite was a class called Dynamics of Speech Production, co-taught by Jason Shaw and Mike Stern. This class walked through the application of dynamical systems models to phonetics and phonology, focused on mathematically representing articulatory kinematics (the movements and trajectories of speech organs like the tongue and lips), and subsequently relating those kinematics to the activity of neuron populations using the same mathematical tools. It was also the funnest class I took there by a wide margin. The other classes were good but not as good.

Jeff Mielke taught a very fun class entitled Tongue Movements and Phonology, which aimed at introducing anatomical descriptions of tongue movements, and their measurements with ultrasound imaging, to the students of the class. (You can see in the photo on the right my attempt at making a model tongue out of clay. It's a little bit wrong but not too much. The palatoglossus is in the complete wrong spot.) Other classes I particularly enjoyed were Zenzi Griffin's Eye Tracking in Psycholinguistic Research class, which provided an overview of eye-tracking and its various applications in linguistic research, and Fermín Moscoso del Prado Martín's Information Theory Tools for Language Research. I took plenty of others but the ones just mentioned were the highlights. There were also some excellent co-located conferences. I attended the Usage-based Approaches to Phonology Conference, and ABSPECK: Abstract and Item Specific Knowledge Across Domains and Frameworks. No shortage of linguistics there!

Eugene was lovely. Quite quiet, but good. Summertime meant the campus was vacated, although many school groups came through for tours, and there were plenty of sporting events. (The U of O has very good sporting facilities -- look them up!) Much of our out-of-class time was spent floating cyclically through the five or so respectable bars in town. A Tuesday group favourite was Max's Tavern. It's a town rumour that Moe's Tavern, from The Simpsons, was inspired by Max's. This isn't hard to believe, especially if you ever get to go inside. They have suspiciously similar interiors. That bar had this magical ability to be filled to the brim on weekday evenings, despite how sparsely inhabited the town felt while the sun was out. Plenty of wacky things were heard at Max's. One man, initially eavesdropping on a conversation between B and me, came over and pitched a rather odd "circular" theory of time in which the events of history are governed by a quartered 120-year temporal cycle. Supposedly, every 120-year period can be explained as a new instantiation of the cycle, and segmented into the same four periods of change. We were urged by the man to enlighten ourselves and read the source of this theory, a book (or "thesis", in his words) entitled The Fourth Turning. At that moment it all suddenly felt like I'd been talking to a cultist for the past 45 minutes (and maybe I was!). I haven't taken his advice yet.

One fellow came up to me and my friend P while we were engaged in a game of pool, fascinated by our (Australian) accents. He asked where we were from, and we told him to guess. He impressively named about every English-speaking country except Australia, and then admitted he was stumped. Upon revealing our nationality, he exclaimed, in the most American of accents: "fucking cunts!". It just sounded so unnatural. He then proceeded to engage in some rather bizarre behaviour, including repeatedly interrupting our pool game to refer to us as his "Australian brother(s)", or thrusting his genitalia into the pool table while asking us about the sexual availability of Australian women. Yikes.

It was surprising how few Americans were able to correctly identify which country I'd travelled from. Most people guessed England or Ireland. Often I don't want to believe stereotypes about Americans, given the huge diversity of the country. But sometimes those stereotypes exist for a reason... The immense natural beauty of Oregon was more than enough to make up for the many strange people. I didn't get around to as many parts of Oregon as I would've liked (I was stupid for not going to Crater Lake before its closure), but did see some nice things. I got to head to Wildwood Falls (pictured) for a swim. Lovely. Went out to Florence on the coast a couple of times -- on one of those occasions I was almost stranded with P and Y at the beach after a rental car fault (we stubbornly turned down a generous man's offer to take us back to town in the bed of his pickup truck, which would've made for exceptional lore).

In the morning of my other trip out to the coast, I was waiting at the bus stop when I made the mistake of engaging with a man sitting on the ground eating a sandwich. He responded to my inquiry about the bus's going to Florence with a telling of his life story. At one point, he confessed to me and my travel companion that he'd spent 90 months in prison. I'm not judging. But he followed this admission by remarking that there was no statute of limitations against murder. My eyebrow instinctively quivered upon hearing this, especially since he wouldn't stop talking to me, and I was in for a 90-minute bus ride that we was potentially about to board. Thankfully he clarified that he meant "attemped murder", although he then described the said attempt as, in his words, "bitch slapping someone with a pickaxe". He reassured us it was with the flat side and not the tip. To be honest, I don't think the reassurance did its job. The man continued with an anecdote detailing a police manhunt that ensued after he stole his children from his ex-wife. There were some rather unsavoury adjectives that modified "ex-wife". An unholy amount of spit mixed with sandwich particles exited his mouth during this whole monologue. Grossed out, I was grateful when the bus arrived and he didn't step on with us. But I was also grateful to have heard his story. It was a nice reminder of how different people's lives could be. Lucky me, getting to holiday overseas and to pursue my intellectual interests.

But these strangities I admit have been cherry-picked, and actually a majority of my time in America was very normal. Extremely normal. To my surprise, given recent events, the normalest place I visited was Portland. It felt very safe and very friendly, like if Melbourne was smaller and people were nice (even if a little NPC-like). One of the definite highlights of my entire holiday was stopping by PDX's Multnomah Whisk(e)y Library. Wow. If you're reading this blog and you don't know me (well), take this chance to learn something new: I am not much of an alcohol consumer, but I do enjoy whisk(e)y very much. MWL, which I knew I had to visit while in Oregon, is a bar with an extensive collection of globally-sourced malt and grain spirits. Up in the 'secret' library room (accessed through a door invisible from the street), they had something like 2,500+ open bottles, only a fraction of which made it onto the very hefty spirits menu. With the meal -- one of the best I've had in the past year -- I forked out for a glass of an independently-bottled 11 year old Bunnahabhain at cask strength (from circa 2010?). Spectacular, as is expected from Bunnahabhain IBs. It was bottled exclusively for American markets, so while I slightly regret not going for some American whiskey, I at least got something exclusive. Anyway. The service there was absolutely impeccable, and it was the experience that highlighted the true superiority of American hospitality. To name just one other highlight, I saw the Bill Frisell Trio live at the Village Vanguard, after listening to I Have The Room Above Her on repeat for the month preceding. The trio was Bill Frisell, Johnathan Blake, and Greg Tardy. About as good as a trio can get! This was set in the middle of some time I spent in New York City after the Institute had wrapped up. I got to the Vanguard about an hour before the gig started and I managed to make it second-in-line, so I could get a seat right up front. Was it worth waiting outside for an hour in a hot and sticky rainstorm? Yes!

I admit, not much has happened since I've been back. I have however been getting along with some research, which has been fun. Last week I gave two presentations on the Australian language Mangarrayi, one on the synchronic verb system and the other on the historical trajectory of change in that system. While I was in the Gold Coast for the conference, I did overhear on a tram the pronunciation of Helensvale as [hælənzveɪl] / 'hallansvale' by the automated announcer, which shocked me because the [æl] pronunciation of /el/ is often identified as a distinctively Victorian linguistic feature (and the fellow on the tram definitely had an otherwise Queenslandic accent). Interesting. Anyway. Site-wise, I aim soon to revitalise the shelf page by updating my picks, especially on the books and movies shelves which are rather impoverished currently. There will also come a new blog post soon, which I'm excited to launch, that tells about some detective work I did in relation to a long-standing pop-linguistic factoid. It'll be a good one, I reckon.

Summarizily, my time in America was good, despite the many difficulties and peculiarities of the trip. I would be very happy to visit again, and to see the many things I missed. But the more important conclusion is: I'm updating this blog anymore. As mentioned, more posts are promised in the coming weeks and months. Finally, I thought it could be fun to end with a recent (and rather surprising) linguistic discovery by F (see here). Finally, someone has captured the elusive morpho-milk-tactic alignment. In Arthur's Milkbarnese, it appears that milk may have nominative-accusative alignment. I never thought I'd live to see the day. Many doors are now open in the field of milk syntax, which will most surely lead our finest syntacticians to some groundbreaking theoretical innovations in the future. Who will be the one to uncover ergatively-aligned milk? We shall wait and see.

# Footnotes

Thanks to AW for telling me about this, at Max's Tavern.

Follow this link to see many of us at Falling Sky brewery. See if you can find me in there! Something like a hundred linguists showed up to this tiny bar, possibly unannounced, to consume some beverages. I did feel quite bad for the two or three bartenders they had stationed there that night.

I should clarify here that many of the people I met in the USA were among the nicest and friendliest people I have ever met. That is one stereotype which I think should be celebrated. Still, how hard is it to recognise an Australian accent?

I do appreciate all styles of whisk(e)y, but with a bias towards those distilleries in the UK. Recently I've been enjoying Lochlea Cask Strength (batch two), which is matured in sherry (PX and Oloroso) and STR casks. A fairly young and environmentally-conscious distillery.

A word heard from CB on 05/08/2025, in class. This speaker is a remarkably creative user of English derivational morphology. Another favourite of mine from him was "wigglage".