![]() ![]() But the "traditional meaning" of hopefully, "in a hopeful manner", still accounts for 24% of instances, so it's misleading to say that this usage is "all but lost". So evaluative hopefully is certainly now part of American English. ![]() By the 2000s, 76% of COHA's instances of hopefully are evaluative, many from esteemed writers in well-edited sources. Copperud was right - in the COHA sample from the 1940s, 2 of 182 instances of hopefully were evaluative adverbials rather than manner adverbials (1%) in the 1950s, the titre was 10 of 220 (4.5%) in the 1960s, it was 82 of 233 (35%).MWDEU was right - going back at least to the 1880s, roughly one hopefully in a hundred was the evaluative type meaning "it is hoped" or "I/we/they hope" rather than the manner-adverbial type.This morning (Istanbul time), I thought I'd take a closer quantitative look at the history of hopefully, using evidence from Mark Davies' Corpus of Historical American English. I didn't quote the end of that sentence, which asserts that hopefully "has all but lost its traditional meaning". And I quoted Bryan Garner as saying, among other things, that "the battle is now over", and " Hopefully is now a part of AmE". ![]() I also quoted MWDEU quoting Copperud 1970 to the effect that the "rapid expansion of use of hopefully as a sentence-modifier" began "about 1960", and I exhibited a Google Ngrams plot supporting this date. In The H-word, I quoted MWDEU to the effect that the sentence-adverb use of hopefully "was available if writers needed it, but few writers did". ![]()
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