Language Log

Moreso

From a student's homework assignment, a week ago:
The moreso caught my eye.  In a minor way because of the spelling, as a single word.  In a major way because of the usage; spelling moreso as two words doesn't make the sentence any less baffling to me:
More so is functioning here like contrastive more (not far from rather in its effect), reinforcing the but.   I can use more, without the so, this way --
or more of (preferably losing the just) --
But more so just doesn't cut it for me; the so seems extraneous.

Recent versions of the OED recognize the spelling moreso (in the U.S.) but not the innovative usage in (1) and (2), or further innovations to be found in writing on the web.  I offer this material as fodder for lexicographers, along with some speculations about the development of innovative moreso/more so.


First, the spelling question.  The spelling moreso is deprecated in several usage sources (for example, Paul Brians's Common Errors in English Usage and Evan Morris's Word Detective site), but it is very common, and the Dec. 2002 draft revision of the OED relevant subsection on more mentions it as an American variant:
In what follows, I'll mostly be citing examples with moreso, simply because searches for this variant produce less junk than searches for more so.  But all the uses below could be equally well documented with more so examples.

Now, on to the uses, beginning with those documented by the OED.  As background, there are occurrences of more with "zero anaphora":

And then more followed by anaphoric so:

The important point here is that more with zero anaphora and more with anaphoric so are in alternation.  Either could replace the other in the examples in (6) and (7); (7d) with plain more is especially felicitous, to my ear.  The choice between one variant and the other is a stylistic one.  One relevant effect is that, in general, explicit anaphora, as in more so, tends to be seen as more emphatic or contrastive than zero anaphora, as in plain more.

This is as far as the OED goes.  The examples are all anaphoric.  But the so in (1) and (2) is not anaphoric.  It is, however, contrastive/emphatic, a fact that suggests a possible route from the system illustrated in the OED to the system illustrated in (1) and (2): alternating more and moreso have been reinterpreted as mere plain and emphatic counterparts, with no necessary anaphoricity.  This system is amply illustrated on the web, notably by many examples with moreso followed by than:
but also without an explicit than for comparison, as in (1) and

At this point, moreso is open to a further reinterpretation, as a simple contrastive sentence adverbial glossable as 'even more, it is even more the case (that/since)', without any specific standard of comparison implicated:
or as a simple contrastive adverb combining with a NP and glossable as 'especially':

In all these developments, the connection to anaphoric comparative more (so) hasn't been entirely lost, though the uses have drifted pretty far from the models in the OED.

zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu

Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 30, 2005 01:09 PM