ABSTRACT
In parts of the United States and Canada, and perhaps ubiquitous in both, is an interesting syntactic form known as the 'ever-exclamation' that has attracted very little attention from linguists and dialectologists. Walter H. Eitner is aware of a geographical discontinuity in this distribution. The parts of the American Midwest where positive any more occurs follow, as he indicates, the inland migration of the Midland settlers. In sentence-initial position, hopefully has pretty well lost its meaning as an adverb of manner. Eitner postulates a 'Scotch-Irish theory of origin', and the doughty presence of Scotch-Irish settlers in its focal region, the American Midland, lends an air of plausibility to his claim. One of the most-discussed shibboleths of English grammar seems, from a linguistic viewpoint, to be a case of an adverb moving from one subclass into another.
