Separated by a Common Language

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? Semantic prosody is when a word that could be defined in a neutral way nevertheless tends to occur in contexts that are mostly negative or mostly positive. So, the word ends up having bad or good connotations. I felt like I was used to altogether occurring in more negative contexts. 

Now, the first thing to do here is to ask: does the fact that happy follows altogether mean that altogether happy is referring to something good? The answer is no: looking at two words together is not enough because there could be a not lurking before those two words. And sure enough, all the BNC examples of altogether happy are actually describing a non-happy state:

That said, the cases of altogether lovely and innocent were mostly not negated—so there was something else going on.

Which adjectives?

• Is altogether used more in BrE than in AmE?  
• A bit:  20 times per million words (pmw) in BrE versus 17 in AmE.
• But altogether has various uses, so...
• Is altogether used to modify adjectives more in BrE than in AmE?
• A tiny bit: 2.43 pmw v 2.17  in AmE for altogether ADJ (1.1x more common in BrE)
• But the more complex the altogether construction, the more British English favo(u)rs it:
• not altogether ADJ is .49 pmw in BrE & .37 in AmE  (1.3x more common in BrE)
• an altogether ADJ (where the altogether ADJ is therefore in a noun phrase) is nearly twice as common in BrE (.7 pmw v .38).

So a phrasing like It was an altogether different experience probably sounds more British than American.

Then I looked at what the top adjectives following altogether in BrE and AmE were:

• The mostly-AmE unnegated adjectives generally describe bad states: useless, absent, ignorant—which explains why I felt weird about hearing pleasant adjectives with altogether. The one mostly-BrE unnegated, non-comparative one is lovely—but I must note: in the corpus, it is mostly found in Muslim religious discourse.

The British use of altogether with comparative/gradable adjectives seems comparable to the use of altogether elsewhere in sentences, where it can mean 'on the whole'. Here's an example from the OED:

• He was altogether a gentle and generous man.

Compare that to:

• He was an altogether gentle and generous man.

For you, do they mean the same thing?

For me the first says 'all things considered, he was a gentle and generous man' and the second is more 'he was a completely gentle and generous man'. But I would suspect that that distinction may not feel as clear for BrE speakers, given the collocations we've seen above.

Has it always been this way?

As it stands, I can't find a dictionary that both (a) distinguishes the use of altogether as an adjective intensifier from it in other adverbial uses (some do, some don't), and (b) notes that the adjective-intensifier usage can sometimes (particularly in BrE) mean something other than 'completely'. And it's not covered in the grammars I've checked or in Algeo's British or American English?

Is that because it's new in BrE? I looked at a few of the altogether+comparative examples in the British part of Google Books, and it looks like altogether better has been used for a long time, as have some others. (Altogether worse, on the other hand, barely moves the needle.)

So, if it's not new in BrE, could it be that it was taken to America and then lost there? Computer says yes:

The Corpus of Historical American English shows that in the 19th century, it was common in AmE to use altogether with gradable adjectives like pleasant, lovely, probable, and easy—and without negation.

Investigating words is good for me

So I started this with something of a bias. An assumption that the more general use of altogether+ADJ must be newer—that people got more 'lax' in its use as time went on. And what I discovered was the opposite: that Americans have been 'tightening up' how this expression can be used. It's certainly not the only time American English has done such a thing—so I should have known better than to have that bias. But biased we all are. As long as we're willing to challenge those biases, we can learn things. 

I have an aside about AI and doing this kind of research, but I am going to save that for when I talk about this post in my Substack newsletter. So if that's of interest and you're not already subscribed, (more BrE) give us a follow at this link.