Saturday, September 10, 2016

meaning - Is there any dialect of English that uses "positive ever" to mean "once"?

One of the most interesting things for me is to learn that some construction that seems completely ungrammatical to me is completely okay for speakers of some other dialect of English. For example, things like "I'm done my homework," "The car needs washed," and "Anymore those things are completely useless."



The last of these constructions, called "positive anymore," comes from a reinterpretation of the word "anymore" used in negative sentences like "I don't like nachos anymore" as meaning something like "nowadays."



Recently, I came across a similar example of what seems to me to be "positive ever":





hmm..actually, i have ever used a fan in an enclosed room for
about maybe 1hr..and yes it got stuffy but no i did not die. But the
stuffiness irritated me so i switched it on the aircon with the fan.




(comment from "Ask a Korean!: FAN DEATH IS REAL")



From the context, it seems like "ever" does not mean "always" here (as it can in archaic speech); instead, it seems to mean something like "once." It seems to me that this reinterpretation is understandable if we look at sentences like "Have you ever [done something]?" which could be rephrased as "Have you [done something] once or more than once?"




I'd like to know if this construction has been observed being used by any native speakers, since I'm not sure if the author above was a native speaker or an English language learner.



I tried to search for more examples on Google, and I came up with a fair amount, but many of them seem to be from non-native speakers. I found the most examples searching for the exact sequence of words "actually I have ever."





I can't find any mention of it on the Yale Grammatical Diversity project website where I got the three sentences in my first paragraph. I googled "positive ever," but it just turned up a post talking about the aforementioned archaic "always" meaning, and not the apparently newer "once" meaning.



I know that to many of you, this construction will sound as wrong as it does to me. So, I'm not interested in just hearing that. What I'd like to see is more evidence about it, such as examples or a description of it being used by some native speakers, or another source besides the BBC link above that states that it is not used by any native speakers.

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