I am not a religious man, but a friend read me a poem by the late Mother Teresa. The poem was called anyway and the link should appear at the bottom. Anyway, it's a nice word. Ha! Funny no. As a beginner in linguistics I began to ponder this word and thought it perhaps some sort of polarity item. Negative polarity items are more common than positive ones in English... what is a polarity item, you ask? Well I may have the answer
A polarity item, to my knowledge, is a word or phrase that can only function in either a positive or negative sense in a sentence is set off by a negation in a sentence, with a not. (A negative polarity item also functions in questions and the questions do not have to be negative. I added this later on and didn't want to be fancy about it). An example is "at all". While one could say "I didn't like that movie at all" it is grammatically impossible and unquestionably awkward to any native speaker of English to say "I liked the movie at all". These polarity items can never be "depolarized", except when they can.
The cases in which they can be depolarized vary on regional dialect. Examples include a positive anymore stemming from Ohio and a positive yet from my homeland, New England. Here is an example of the positive anymore: There are potholes in the street, anymore. This means that there are in fact potholes currently in the street. Here is an example of the positive yet: I have eaten yet. This means I have in fact eaten. Generally I feel, since it is sort of in my grammar (with this I have certain intuitions that you may lack :P), that there is a question of yet that precedes or an implication of it. Actually, I have no evidence for this, so don't take my word for it. I simply just sense a phantom prompt for this yet when I hear it.
Anyway... i digress. Ha, again! Anyway clearly isn't a polarity item because it functions in both positive and negative sentences (ex. I watched/didn't watch it anyway) with perfectly grammatical execution. I can't really find anything online about it, but in my search I found a cool wikipedia spinoff for linguist, called Glottopedia. I'll also add it to the list, hopefully. Can anyone out there tell me anything about anyway, anyway? Could you tell me something cool, perhaps, something revealing? Maybe not.
Sincerely Trying Anyway
Sites:
Peom- http://dbooth.org/guat2000/small/teresa.htm
Glottopedia- http://www.glottopedia.de/index.php/Main_Page
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