Nevertheless
From a
Sports Illustrated blog, by
Stewart Mandell:
N.C. State fans don't take well to
losing to the hated Tar Heels, nevertheless 23-9 to a 1-9 UNC team
playing for a lame-duck coach.
This is
nevertheless used as
a negative-form additive connector, like
not to mention,
never mind, or
to say nothing of. John
Schaefer, who found the example, speculates (reasonably enough) that
it's a feature of speech that has found its way onto the net (though
it's not a use of
nevertheless
I recall hearing before), and he wonders how you'd do a Google search
to find more occurrences. Good question.
[Addendum 11/24: Doug Wilson on ADS-L and Marilyn Martin by e-mail suggest that the target was probably "much less", a connective that follows negative clauses -- and ends in "less". Bingo.]
So, first, a query: has anyone noticed similar examples? Mail me
if you have actual cites.
[Addendum 11/24: John Schaefer's found another one: "Miami can continue to have both and help kids that may never have seen the campus of college, nevertheless a private school." (from "dg", 7/21/06,
here).]
Second, some thoughts on searching (on Google or elsewhere) for what is
probably a very infrequent use of a very frequent word. One way
that might get the task down to something manageable would be to do it
in two steps: first, determine what material follows
not to mention and
to say nothing of with some
frequency (
never mind might
not work, because it so often stands alone); and then, search for
nevertheless followed by this
material.
This is the sort of strategy that the Stanford ALL Project used
recently in searching for instances of quotative
all ("And she was all 'Were you in
the church?'") in a gigantic database of postings on newsgroups that
Google has accumulated: we refined the search by first determining the
most frequent words immediately following an initial quotation mark,
then used the top 40 words as part of a regular expression searching
for a personal pronoun plus contracted copula, followed by
all,
all like,
like,
say, or
go. (The results of this
research were reported on at the recent NWAV conference at Ohio
State.) Even so, the project took a lot of time and depended on
considerable cooperation from colleagues at Google and on research
assistants supported by Stanford. Not a quick and easy task.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at November 23, 2006 11:01 PM